Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : DENGEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université Johns-Hopkins — Pays : Etats-Unis — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : JHU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 253750.0 €

Across pathogens, it remains unclear why some lineages persist while others die out. Population immunity pressure coupled with relative abilities to infect and disseminate in hosts are likely to play a critical role. There are key data and methodological gaps that prevent us from identifying and quantifying drivers of pathogen fitness. We need robust measures of fitness and be able to apply these measures to sequences from the same ecological disease system over many years. We also need to understand how an individual's immunity responds, if at all, to ongoing exposures by continuously changing pathogens. Finally, we need appropriate methods that can integrate candidate drivers of fitness within the same analytical framework. Using dengue virus as a model system, I will use annual sequence data from Thailand collected from 1973 to today alongside long term measurements of immune responses in the same individuals over 25 years apart to answer the following questions:   - How does individual immunity change over decadal time frames? I will re-recruit individuals who were infected with dengue virus during participation in cohort studies in the 1990s. I will measure their antibody response today to viruses that have circulated over the past 58 years, including the specific virus that infected them in the 1990s. I will compare their responses today to those in stored samples from the original cohort study.  - What are the drivers of fitness? I will quantify the changing fitness of circulating dengue viruses from 1973 to today. I will then explore how changes in viral dissemination in mosquitoes, changes in kinetics in human cells and the build up of strain-specific population immunity interact to determine viral fitness. By studying the dynamic interplay between pathogen fitness, host immunity and vector, this project will explore a fundamental concept of disease ecology, as well as providing insights into a major threat to global public health.

Mots-clés : dengue virus,antibody dynamics,viral diversity
Projet ERC : ANUBIS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université Eberhard Karl de Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997250.0 €

Scientific knowledge enters computers through data on the one side, and laws of nature – implicit equations like differential equations and symmetries – on the other. They both provide information, empirical and mechanistic, respectively, crucial to the deduction of new insights. But the algorithms that operate on these sources of information stem from different communities and different eras: machine learning – "big data" – on the one hand, and simulation methods – high performance computing – on the other. One of the problems that arise from this disconnect is that inferring latent forces that drive dynamical systems from data requires "shoehorning" different algorithms together in inefficient optimization loops; another one is that uncertainty from discretization and emulation is not fully tracked. Probabilistic numerical methods have emerged over the last decade as a holistic view on computation as inference. They provide a unifying language that can leverage empirical and mechanistic information. This proposal outlines a research program to complement and scale probabilistic numerical methods to enrich the quantitative scientist's toolbox along three axes: First, unifying uncertainty from empirical and computational knowledge in one common formalism, which allows the direct and robust combination of simulation and experimentation. Second, developing a rich and practical semantic language for the description of different types of knowledge – mechanistic, empirical, practical. Third, significant computational efficiency gains achieved by managing the computational process globally, instead of as a series of black boxes. Real scientific tasks will provide benchmarks and ensure practical relevance. An open-source software toolbox, complemented by regular summer schools, will ensure that the results reach their audience. As a result, ANUBIS will start a genuinely novel kind of quantitative scientific analysis at the intersection of simulation and machine learning.

Mots-clés : machine learning dynamical systems scientific machine learning
Projet ERC : EXCITE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université d'Aarhus — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999899.0 €

Light-induced phase transitions in solids present a tantalizing opportunity for controlling the constituents of matter. An intense optical excitation with a duration on the order of femtoseconds can trigger nonthermal electronic and structural configurations, switching the excited material into a hidden phase that may be exploited to realize new technologies such as ultrafast memory devices. A general picture of the microscopic processes underpinning hidden phases has not been established. Their existence has therefore only been exposed in a handful of systems, presenting a major obstacle for achieving on-demand quantum materials with light.  Drawing inspiration from these unique systems, I hypothesize that materials with a strongly correlated phase that is pinned by a two-dimensional superstructure provide a trajectory to a light-induced hidden phase. The objectives of EXCITE are (A) to establish the experimental parameter space to determine the electronic structure of hidden phases in bulk and single-layer correlated transition metal dichalcogenides, (B) to demonstrate the existence of hidden phases in optically excited moiré superstructures that simulate strongly correlated behavior and (C) to exploit the wide tunability of these systems in order to disentangle the general microscopic degrees of freedom that govern the trajectory into a hidden phase.  The objectives will be accomplished by establishing a state-of-the-art experiment to optically excite in situ prepared materials and probe their electronic structure during phase transitions with nanoscale spatial resolution and femtosecond time resolution. These ground-breaking capabilities will be realized by integrating a high-power laser system with my new synchrotron beamline for nanoscale photoemission spectroscopy (nanoARPES) at the ASTRID2 light source, Aarhus University. My experiments will enable me to critically assess basic assumptions in the field and move the boundaries of ultrafast science.

Mots-clés : 2d materials,charge density waves,mott insulators,van der waals heterostructures,twistronics,synchrotron radiation,phase transitions,ultrafast dynamics,superconductivity,angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy
Projet ERC : RefLex (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université Queen's — Pays : Canada — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Université Queen's
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 37552.0 €

Is International Refugee Law effective? This is the central question of RefLex, a project that will offer the first comprehensive empirical study of the workings and effectiveness of International Refugee Law (IRL), a body of law partly imbricated with International Human Rights Law (IHRL), domesticated and judicialized to an extraordinary degree across the globe. There are many theoretically and empirically rich studies of effectiveness of International Human Rights Law (IHRL), as well as many other fields of International Law (IL) in constructivist International Relations (IR) in particular. The effectiveness of human rights courts and other bodies is also a well-established academic subfield. However, there are no analogous empirical studies of IRL in practice. RefLex will fill this huge puzzling knowledge gap, thereby making a vital contribution both to refugee studies and to scholarship on the theory and practical workings of IL. It will develop a new dataset, the Refugee Protection Index (RPI), in order to enable our (and other) large-n quantitative studies, identify key cases to trace how IRL comes to be effective, or not. It will also contribute to the burgeoning field of legal mobilization (LM) studies, which again, have failed to examine refugee legal mobilisation in comparative or transnational fashion. It will break new ground here also, by studying LM from above and below by studying both UNHCR’s own LM and that of refugees themselves, both acting via transnational organisations and in local settings. The analysis of the RPI will inform the choice of LM casestudies, in order to develop a new account of when LM emerges and when it is effective. The project aims to provide vital insights at a time when the Global Refugee Regime (GRR) is seen to be increasingly adrift from IL, with over challenges to core norms, and practices focusing on informal cooperation, ‘deals’ and political trading, lacking normative specificity and legal force.

Mots-clés : international refugee law effectiveness of international treaties and norms impact of human rights courts and un treaty bodies legal mobilization role of unhcr refugee legal mobilization
Projet ERC : eSYMb (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université d'Aarhus — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1061076.48 €

Understanding the unique evolutionary trajectory taken by the human species is impossible without appreciation of our special capacities for symbolic cognition and behavior. But how did these capacities evolve during the late Middle Palaeolithic? Within only the last couple of decades, early milestones in human symbolic behavior have been continuously revised as new excavations across the globe challenge previous long-held assumption. However, at the same time we have made little progress in our understanding of past symbolic behaviour and the mechanisms by which it evolved. As tools of the mind, symbols are constituted by the intangible cognitive processes they evoke in pragmatic use contexts, which are inaccessible to the standard methods of archaeology or genetics. With eSYMb, I will establish a novel integrative framework for the systematic investigation of early symbolic evolution directly frontloading records from archaeology in experimental investigations and computational modelling based on state-of-the-art methods from the cognitive sciences. Starting from the assumption that symbolic artefacts evolve adaptively over time to better fulfil their intended functions, I will investigate these structural changes and their cognitive implications to inform inferences about their past use. The framework will thus establish transparent, data-driven methods and criteria to test – for the first time - concrete hypotheses about early human symbolic behaviour from 6+ archaeological sites from the late Middle and early Upper Palaeolithic (~150.000 – 12.000 years ago) based on measures critical to symbolic cognition and behaviour. In summary, the objective of eSYMb is to bring systematic scientific rigour to the investigation and interpretation of early human symbolic behaviour particularly from.

Mots-clés : cultural evolution,experimental semiotics,symbol use,iterated learning,language evolution
Projet ERC : CarboCell (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université Christian Albrecht de Kiel — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The process of biomineralization has profound impacts on the geology of our planet and is an integral part of the global carbon cycle by generating large amounts of CaCO3 bound in coral reefs, chalk mountains and deep sea sediments. Mounting evidence demonstrate that many marine calcifiers generate biominerals by the intracellular formation of CaCO3 from seawater Ca2+ and metabolic CO2. To date, the underlying mechanisms that control the carbonate chemistry in calcifying vesicles are unknown which however will provide ground-breaking insights into a biological process that is capable of transforming a metabolic waste product - CO2 - into a versatile construction material. In the past 5 years my group has developed a unique methodological expertise to study the cellular physiology of calcifying systems. Building on this expertise CarboCell will tackle the important but challenging task to identify and understand the mechanisms of vesicular calcification. The sea urchin larva will serve as a powerful model organism, that represents a prime example for the intracellular formation of CaCO3 and which allows us to employ specifically targeted molecular perturbations in combination with sub-cellular ion and pH recordings. CarboCell will take a stepwise strategy to systematically examine the mechanisms of vesicular calcification on the three main core subjects- carbonate chemistry (WP1), ion/CO2 transport mechanisms (WP2) and vesicular volume regulation and trafficking (WP3). CarboCell will provide a deep mechanistic understanding of the calcification process with strong implications for explaining and predicting responses of marine calcifiers to the global phenomenon of ocean acidification. More importantly, knowledge about the mechanisms that allow organisms to transform CO2 into a construction material will pave the ground for novel, biology-inspired solutions of CO2 capture and utilization – a basic science approach at the core of twenty-first century concerns.

Mots-clés : biomineralization,sea urchin larva,life cell imaging,physiology,membrane transport,climate change
Projet ERC : RS³ (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1262476.91 €

In parallel with the ongoing digitization, computer security has become an increasingly important and urgent challenge. In particular, the sound and robust implementation of complex software systems is still not well understood in practice, as evidenced by the steady stream of successful attacks observed in the wild. The current state of the art in software security consists of solutions that are often technically sound, but do not provide operational security in practice. With the Resilient and Sustainable Software Security (RS³) project, we propose a compelling research agenda to fundamentally change this situation by developing novel countermeasures at different system levels that fundamentally improve security. On the one hand, the system must be "resilient" against entire classes of attack vectors. On the other hand, the system must be "sustainable", i.e., it must be able to maintain its security at least over its design lifetime and possibly even adapt over time. Our work plan addresses the problem from four different angles by (i) developing novel software testing strategies that enable accurate and efficient vulnerability discovery, (ii) designing secure compiler chains that embed security properties during the compilation phase that can be enforced at runtime, (iii) devising robust mechanisms that mitigate and patch advanced attacks, and (iv) investigating how hardware changes for open-source hardware (e.g., RISC-V processors) can improve the efficiency and accuracy of all of these goals. We expect to develop innovative methods and fundamental principles to build, test, and patch complex systems securely and efficiently. This holistic approach covers multiple layers of the computing stack, and each aspect has the potential to improve security significantly. The main success criterion will be our ability to perform a security analysis of a complex system an order of magnitude more effectively and efficiently than with current state-of-the-art methods.

Mots-clés : computer security software security software testing fuzzing attack mitigations
Projet ERC : MICROBIOSIS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999975.0 €

Since 450 million years, roots of healthy plant are colonised by diverse communities of bacteria, fungi, and oomycetes which are known to extend host functions by protecting roots from disease or by promoting water and nutrient acquisition. More remarkably, recent evidence suggests that bidirectional signalling between belowground microbial commensals and distant aboveground host organs is likely critical for maintaining host-microbe homeostasis and plant health. Reminiscent of the critical role of the microbiota-gut-brain axis for modulating brain functions in animals, we recently obtained evidence supporting the role of the microbiota-root-shoot axis for integrating response to microbes belowground and response to light aboveground. MICROBIOSIS aims at thoroughly dissecting the bi-directional connections between microbial root commensals and shoot developmental processes using Arabidopsis and tomato as model plant systems. By testing the hypothesis that co-evolutionary history between microbial root commensals and their hosts have shaped complex regulatory circuits modulating plant health, MICROBIOSIS aims at unravelling the physiological relevance of the microbiota-root-shoot axis for maintaining host-microbe homeostasis and for integrating multiple stress responses occurring in distant root and shoot organs. Using multi-kingdom synthetic microbial communities, cutting-edge metabolome, microbiome and grafting techniques, as well as several innovative and advanced gnotobiotic plant systems in which below-ground and aboveground organs are physically separated, MICROBIOSIS has the ambition to 1) bridge the gap between functional biology and ecology, 2) decrypt root microbiota-dependant regulatory circuits promoting plant health, and 3) design synthetic multi-kingdom microbial communities with modular functions favouring resistance to multiple aboveground stresses.

Mots-clés : plant microbiome,microbiota root shoot axis,synthetic communities,synthetic ecosystems,exudates,biotic and abiotic stresses,bacteria,fungi,oomycetes
Projet ERC : SymbioticExchange (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Nutrient acquisition is the basis of life. Arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) symbiosis of plants with nutrient-delivering fungi is detected in the oldest land plant fossils and considered a prerequisite for plant life on land. It is wide-spread in the plant kingdom and its secondary loss is the exception. AM improves plant nutrition, stress resistance and general plant performance. Breeding AM-optimized crops has significant potential for improving food security and sustainable agriculture. Understanding the molecular underpinnings of AM function is thus imperative. The hallmark of the symbiosis are the arbuscules, highly branched hyphal structures, which develop in root cortex cells. They build a large membrane interface with the plant derived peri-arbuscular membrane (PAM) that surrounds them. Most mineral nutrients are delivered from the arbuscules and taken up via the PAM into plant cells through transporter proteins. In return, the fungi receive up to 20% of the photosynthetically-fixed carbon. The balance in mineral-nutrient-gain-for-carbon-loss influences the effect of the symbiosis in plant growth and yield. However, the full range of transported nutrients, any mechanisms regulating transport and the balance in molecular exchange are unknown. ‘SymbioticExchange’ strategically integrates transcriptomics, phosphoproteomics, metabolomics and protein-protein interaction analysis, with reverse genetics, cell biology and transport physiology to identify novel plant and fungal transporters involved in symbiotic nutrient and metabolite exchange, and to understand the molecular mechanisms of their regulation. ‘SymbioticExchange’ will thus deliver major advances on the range of transporters at the plant-fungal interface, the exchanged goods and the regulation of exchange. This important knowledge-base will provide crucial clues on how nutrient exchange can be tuned for profitable agricultural application of one of the most important symbioses on earth.

Mots-clés : plant symbiosis,plant nutrition,beneficial fungi,nutrient transport,metabolite transport,regulation of transport