Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : UMMA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Warsaw — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UW
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1484854.0 €

UMMA (Arab. أمة - community) is a multidisciplinary project aimed as the first study of the liminal phases of a Christian African community inhabiting Dongola, the capital city of of Makuria (modern Sudan). It will concern the twilight of Christian Dongola and the metamorphosis of its urban community into a new entity organised along different social and religious paradigms. The project will investigate the impact between the weakening of the central authority and migrations of Islamic Arab tribes on the kingdom’s capital city and its community. The notion that the project intends to investigate is that a complete breakdown of this urban organism and its hinterland was avoided thanks to cooperation established between the remaining local community and migrant population groups arriving in the period under consideration. The project will seek to identify strategies of interaction between the local community and the newcomers, as well as patterns of survival of the old traditions on household level. UMMA will lay foundations for further enquiries into evolution of precolonial African communities and provoke a general discussion on social changes in urban environments. It will unfold a whole new research perspective on the period from the gradual decline of the kingdom of Makuria (14th-15th cent. CE) to the Egyptian invasion in 1820, which is virtually absent from scholarly enquiry to date. UMMA brings together specialists from several disciplines to carry out an exemplary archaeological project to set the standards for future archaeological research on late medieval and early modern Sudan. The project will combine methods of inquiry used in disciplines like history, archaeology, geophysics, chemistry and physics to obtain a multifaceted, cross-disciplinary perspective on the social phenomenon of liminal periods in urbanism.

Mots-clés : nubia
Projet ERC : PULSAR (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1896581.0 €

Ultra-intense femtosecond laser pulses promise to become a fast, universal, predictable and green tool for material processing at micro and nanometric scale. The recent tremendous increase in commercially available femtosecond laser energy at high repetition rate opens a wealth of novel perspectives for mass production. But even at high energy, laser processing remains limited to high-speed scanning point by point removal of ultra-thin nanometric layers from the material surface. This is because the uncontrolled laser-generated free-electron plasma shields against light and prevents reaching extreme internal temperatures at very precise nanometric scale. PULSAR aims at breaking this barrier and developing a radically different concept of laser material modification regime based on free-electron plasma control. PULSAR 's unconventional concept is to control plasma generation, confinement, excitation and stability. An ambitious experimental and numerical research program will push the frontiers of laser processing to unprecedented precision, speed and predictability. PULSAR key concept is highly generic and the results will initiate new research across laser and plasma material processing, plasma physics and ultrafast optics.

Mots-clés : ultrashort pulse laser ablation,laser micromachining
Projet ERC : TAME-Plasmons (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Padua — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIPD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 916621.53 €

Ultrafast spectroscopy is a powerful tool able to disclose the atomistic real-time motion picture of the basic chemical events behind technology and Life, such as catalytic reactions or photosynthetic light harvesting. Nowadays, by cleverly harnessing the interaction of the studied molecules with plasmons (collective electron excitations supported, e.g., by metal nanoparticles) it is becoming possible to focus these investigations on specific nanoscopic regions, such as a portion of a catalytic surface or of a photosynthetic membrane. This coupling can also produce new quantum effects such as molecule-plasmon hybrid excitations. On the other hand, it makes the real-time molecular evolution and its perturbation by light more complex, and thus calls for new theoretical treatments. The available ones are unable to tackle this complexity, because they consist of phenomenological models focused on field enhancements or on generic features of the various plasmon-molecule coupling regimes. The goal of TAME-Plasmons is to develop a theoretical chemistry approach to directly simulate the real time evolution of molecules interacting with plasmons and light. Our approach lifts the current theoretical limitations by coupling a real-time quantum chemical description of the molecules with a time-dependent electromagnetic description of plasmons, rooted in our previous work on steady-state molecular plasmonics. We will implement this approach in an open-source software, accessible also to non-specialists. We will address current open issues such as the controversial nature of plasmon-aided frequency up-conversion by noble gases and the interpretation of sub-molecularly resolved photoemission induced by scanning tunneling microscopy. We will also anticipate questions that may arise along with progress in the field, for example how to engineer energy transfer paths in photosynthetic light harvesting proteins by exploiting the coupling to plasmons.

Mots-clés : time dependent density functional theory,ultrafast spectroscopy,molecular plasmonics,implicit solvation models
Projet ERC : TAME-Plasmons (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : National Research Council — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CNR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 516268.47 €

Ultrafast spectroscopy is a powerful tool able to disclose the atomistic real-time motion picture of the basic chemical events behind technology and Life, such as catalytic reactions or photosynthetic light harvesting. Nowadays, by cleverly harnessing the interaction of the studied molecules with plasmons (collective electron excitations supported, e.g., by metal nanoparticles) it is becoming possible to focus these investigations on specific nanoscopic regions, such as a portion of a catalytic surface or of a photosynthetic membrane. This coupling can also produce new quantum effects such as molecule-plasmon hybrid excitations. On the other hand, it makes the real-time molecular evolution and its perturbation by light more complex, and thus calls for new theoretical treatments. The available ones are unable to tackle this complexity, because they consist of phenomenological models focused on field enhancements or on generic features of the various plasmon-molecule coupling regimes. The goal of TAME-Plasmons is to develop a theoretical chemistry approach to directly simulate the real time evolution of molecules interacting with plasmons and light. Our approach lifts the current theoretical limitations by coupling a real-time quantum chemical description of the molecules with a time-dependent electromagnetic description of plasmons, rooted in our previous work on steady-state molecular plasmonics. We will implement this approach in an open-source software, accessible also to non-specialists. We will address current open issues such as the controversial nature of plasmon-aided frequency up-conversion by noble gases and the interpretation of sub-molecularly resolved photoemission induced by scanning tunneling microscopy. We will also anticipate questions that may arise along with progress in the field, for example how to engineer energy transfer paths in photosynthetic light harvesting proteins by exploiting the coupling to plasmons.

Mots-clés : time dependent density functional theory,ultrafast spectroscopy,molecular plasmonics,implicit solvation models
Projet ERC : TIMP (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2381700.0 €

Ultrahigh-speed microscopy at Tera-scale frames per second frame-rate is essential for various applications in science and technology. In particular, it is critical for observing ultrafast non-repetitive events, for which the pump-probe technique is inapplicable. The spatial resolutions of such microscopes is to date limited to the micrometer scale. I propose to develop such microscopes with nanometric resolution. The Tera-scale frames per second frame rate microscopes with nanometric resolution will be based on a new approach for ultrahigh-speed imaging that we recently proposed: time-resolved imaging by multiplexed ptychography (TIMP). In TIMP, multiple frames of the object are recovered algorithmically from data measured in a single CCD exposure of a single-shot ptychographic microscope. The frame rate is determined by the light source (burst of pulses) and it is largely uncoupled from the microscope spatial resolution, which can be sub-wavelength. Also important, TIMP yields movies of both the amplitude and phase dynamics of the imaged object. It is simple and versatile, thus it can be implemented across the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as with other waves. I aim to develop TIMP-based microscopes, in the visible, extreme UV and x-ray spectral regions with Tera-scale frames per second frame rate and nanometric resolution. We will utilize the unprecedented imaging capabilities in applications, including exploring ultrafast phase transitions, ultrafast dynamics in nanostructures, and tracking the spatiotemporal dynamics during passive mode-locking build-up in lasers and Kerr micro-resonators. This program, if successful, will bring the field of imaging into a new era, where ultrafast dynamics of non-repetitive transient complex-valued objects can be viewed at nanometric resolution.

Mots-clés : coherent diffraction imaging,microscopy,ultrahigh speed imaging,ultrafast optics
Projet ERC : PGErepro (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1494055.0 €

Under Mendelian inheritance, individuals receive one set of chromosomes from each of their parents, and transmit one set of these chromosomes at random to their offspring. Yet, in thousands of animals Mendel's laws are broken and the transmission of maternal and paternal alleles lose their symmetry. A large body of theory suggests that these asymmetries might arise because of maternal–paternal genetic conflict, but empirical tests are sorely needed to test whether the plausible is actual. This proposal aims to understand why, when and how the transmission of genes from one generation to the next deviates from Mendel’s laws. We ask how different types of sexual conflict -- both directly between parents (interlocus sexual conflict), indirectly between the parent’s genes within their offspring (intragenomic sexual conflict), and between genes expressed in males and females (intralocus sexual conflict) -- can affect the evolution of non-Mendelian reproduction. We focus on species with extreme reproductive asymmetry known as Paternal Genome Elimination (PGE). PGE males systematically transmit only those chromosomes that they inherited from their mother. This unusual reproductive strategy is thought to originate from a clash of interests between the sexes, where mothers have “won” by monopolizing the parentage of their sons. Although PGE is rarely studied, its repeated evolution and experimental tractability make it an ideal test case for understanding the role of sexual conflict in the evolution of genetic systems.

Mots-clés : sexual conflict,transmission genetics,sex determination,entomology,genomic imprinting,reproduction,meiotic drive
Projet ERC : GyroSCoPe (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GFZ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1963229.0 €

Under the threat of ongoing global warming, predictions concerning how much temperatures will rise and precipitation will change are undergoing continual improvement, but the spatial distribution of predicted changes and their impacts on Earth-surface processes, notably erosion and sedimentation, are subject to great uncertainty. Such processes have immediate consequences for people living along alluvial or “transport-limited” rivers, which constitute the majority of rivers on Earth, yet their evolution in response to external forcing conditions is not well understood. In the GyroSCoPe project, I will address these knowledge gaps through an innovative approach that focuses on how periodic changes in climate affect Earth-surface processes. Specifically, because the dominant forcing frequencies have changed through time (notably at the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, MPT), and the frequency of each forcing period likely dictates how far downstream in alluvial channels impacts are felt, it should be possible to decipher the impacts of individual periodic forcings in the geologic record. To do this, I will apply novel tools to decipher erosion histories in mountainous regions, specifically at the MPT, and I will investigate alluvial fans and terraces in the context of a new numerical model developed by my group. These data will allow me to interpret the impact of a change in the dominant forcing period on hillslope erosion rates, track how this sediment propagates across landscapes through alluvial rivers, and thus provide a wealth of data that can be used to calibrate landscape-evolution and alluvial-channel models. This improved understanding of the fundamental impacts of the magnitude and frequency of periodic forcing on erosion rates and sediment transport through rivers will in turn enable (1) the use of terraces and fans as paleoclimate proxies, which can be used to test climate models and (2) predicting Earth-surface responses to ongoing and future climate changes.

Mots-clés : earth surface processes,climate forcing,thermochronology,cosmogenic nuclides,alluvial channels,numerical modelling
Projet ERC : CoSI (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Polish Academy of Sciences — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PAN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1312500.0 €

Understanding how brain controls social interactions is one of the central goals of neuroscience. Whereas social interactions and their effects on the emotional state of an individual are relatively well described at the behavioral level, much less is known about neural mechanisms involved in these very complex phenomena, especially in the amygdala, a key structure processing emotions in the brain. Recent investigations, mainly on fear learning and extinction, have shown that there are highly specialized neuronal circuits within the amygdala that control specific behaviors. However, a high density of interconnections, both among amygdalar nuclei and between amygdalar nuclei and other brain regions, and the lack of a predictable distribution of functional cell types make defining behavioral functions of the amygdalar neuronal circuits challenging. Therefore, to understand how different neuronal circuits in the amygdala produce different behaviors tracing anatomical connections between activated neurons, i.e., the functional anatomy is needed. Published data and our preliminary results suggest that within the amygdala there exist different neuronal circuits mediating social interactions of different valence (positive or negative affective significance) and that circuits controlling social and non-social emotions differ. Combining our recently developed behavioral models of adult, non-aggressive, same-sex social interactions with the methods of tracing anatomical connections between activated neurons, we plan to identify neural circuitry underlying social interactions of different emotional valence. This goal will be achieved by: (1) Characterizing functional anatomy of neuronal circuits in the amygdala underlying socially transferred emotions; (2) Examining role of the identified neuronal subpopulations in control of social behaviors; (3) Verifying role of matrix metalloproteinase-9-dependent neuronal subpopulations within the amygdala in social motivation.

Mots-clés : social interaction,emotional valence,functional anatomy
Projet ERC : PhytoTrace (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BOKU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1195375.5 €

Understanding how plants respond to micronutrient deficiency and which biogeochemical processes are induced at the root-soil interface, i.e. the rhizosphere, is crucial to improve crop yield and micronutrient grain content for high quality food and feed. Iron nutrition by grass species relies on the release and re-uptake of phytosiderophores, which are root exudates that form stable complexes with Fe but also other trace metals such as Zn and Cu. However, neither the importance of phytosiderophores under Zn and Cu deficient conditions nor the interplay of plant responses and rhizosphere processes are well understood as the majority of studies in the past was carried out under ‘soil-free’ hydroponic conditions. In this project, I aim to elucidate the mechanisms controlling phytosiderophore-mediated micronutrient acquisition of barley (Hordeum vulgare) under Zn, Cu, and as reference, Fe deficient conditions, with particular emphasis on soil environments. Barley is the fifth most produced crop worldwide and of great importance in regions that are characterized by harsh living conditions. In a holistic approach, my team and I will apply innovative soil-based and traditional hydroponic root exudation sampling approaches in combination with advanced plant molecular techniques to study the phytosiderophore release and uptake system under different experimental conditions. The chemical synthesis of otherwise commercially unavailable phytosiderophores in their natural and 13C-labelled form will allow us to trace their decomposition and metal solubilizing efficiency in the plant-microbe-soil system to uncover the interplay of plant genetic responses and rhizosphere processes affecting the time-window of PS-mediated MN acquisition. Moving beyond ‘soil-free’ experimental designs of the past, this project will generate key knowledge to improve selection of crops with highly efficient micronutrient acquisition traits to alleviate micronutrient malnutrition of people world-wide.

Mots-clés : phytosiderophores,barley,root exudates,micronutrient deficient soils,rhizosphere,microbial decomposition,plant transcriptome responses
Projet ERC : PhytoTrace (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : TU Wien — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : TUW
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 213790.0 €

Understanding how plants respond to micronutrient deficiency and which biogeochemical processes are induced at the root-soil interface, i.e. the rhizosphere, is crucial to improve crop yield and micronutrient grain content for high quality food and feed. Iron nutrition by grass species relies on the release and re-uptake of phytosiderophores, which are root exudates that form stable complexes with Fe but also other trace metals such as Zn and Cu. However, neither the importance of phytosiderophores under Zn and Cu deficient conditions nor the interplay of plant responses and rhizosphere processes are well understood as the majority of studies in the past was carried out under ‘soil-free’ hydroponic conditions. In this project, I aim to elucidate the mechanisms controlling phytosiderophore-mediated micronutrient acquisition of barley (Hordeum vulgare) under Zn, Cu, and as reference, Fe deficient conditions, with particular emphasis on soil environments. Barley is the fifth most produced crop worldwide and of great importance in regions that are characterized by harsh living conditions. In a holistic approach, my team and I will apply innovative soil-based and traditional hydroponic root exudation sampling approaches in combination with advanced plant molecular techniques to study the phytosiderophore release and uptake system under different experimental conditions. The chemical synthesis of otherwise commercially unavailable phytosiderophores in their natural and 13C-labelled form will allow us to trace their decomposition and metal solubilizing efficiency in the plant-microbe-soil system to uncover the interplay of plant genetic responses and rhizosphere processes affecting the time-window of PS-mediated MN acquisition. Moving beyond ‘soil-free’ experimental designs of the past, this project will generate key knowledge to improve selection of crops with highly efficient micronutrient acquisition traits to alleviate micronutrient malnutrition of people world-wide.

Mots-clés : phytosiderophores,barley,root exudates,micronutrient deficient soils,rhizosphere,microbial decomposition,plant transcriptome responses