Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SENSORTHALAMUS (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Miguel Hernandez University — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UMH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 931864.0 €

The cerebral cortex is organized into highly specialized sensory areas. Thus, it is fundamental to understand how these areas acquire and maintain their identity and functional organization. Challenging normal brain development and forcing the brain to the limits of plasticity, offers us the possibility to shed light on these issues. Accordingly, we shall use prenatal sensory deprivation as a model to understand the mechanisms underlying early neuroplasticity, events that could influence the natural organization of sensory cortical areas. Early sensory deprivation produces profound changes in the cortex, provoking the reorganization of both the deprived and the spared cortical territories. Classically, this adaptation is thought to require sensory experience from the intact sensory modalities. However, our recent data from embryonic deprived mice challenge this view, suggesting that a component independent of experience contributes to this reorganization and that the thalamus plays a pivotal role in these events. Hence, we now propose to adopt multidisciplinary and innovative approaches to characterize the structural, genetic and functional rearrangements in the thalamus following embryonic sensory deprivation, and to define the factors and mechanisms that drive cortical specificity. Experimental results from sensory deprived animals in which the thalamus and gene expression is manipulated in vivo, will be integrated to explain when and how neuroplastic cortical adaptations are triggered in the deprived brain. To further understand the rewiring capacity of thalamic neurons and their potential role in sensory restoration, we will adopt a high-risk, high-gain approach to reprogramme nuclei specific thalamic neurons. The novel information obtained will establish how sensory inputs and thalamocortical connections govern cortical activity and architecture, ultimately sculpting perceptual behaviour.

Mots-clés : thalamus,cortical areas,sensory deprivation,neuroplasticity,spontaneous activity,reprogramming,transgenic mice
Projet ERC : LO-ACT (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Sheffield — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1330221.0 €

The challenge of LO-ACT is to enable low carbon urban development in medium and small cities in rapidly urbanising areas in East, Central and West Africa, South Asia and South East Asia. The majority of emissions in the next century will be emitted by infrastructures that are yet to be built, particularly in rapidly urbanising areas where infrastructure is lacking. Population forecasts suggest that most population growth will take place in small and medium cities. Yet, to date, research on climate action has focused on showcasing strongly branded, successful initiatives in global cities. The low carbon transition depends on myriad of actions in ordinary cities, that is, cities outside global networks of climate innovation and leadership. LO-ACT will address this critical gap by delivering the first multi-dimensional, large scale assessment of low carbon action in ordinary cities. It will contribute a new framework to understand global environmental politics and urban governance. First, LO-ACT will analyse the imaginaries of local action that have shaped global environmental politics over 30 years (Objective 1). The work programme will also analyse the mobility of low carbon urban policies in transport, energy, and housing across different urban contexts (Objective 2). LO-ACT will deliver a comparative analysis of urban trajectories in 113 ordinary cities, and five in-depth ethnographic case studies (Objective 3). Finally, it will provide a critical assessment of governance theory and a revised framework to acknowledge the messy and ordinary contexts of urban action (Objective 4). LO-ACT will bring together an interdisciplinary, international team of researchers, an international network of academic advisors, and four regional hubs that will support context-specific data collection and analysis. The research will contribute to the fields of human geography, urban studies, environmental politics, sustainability transitions and science and technology studies.

Mots-clés : climate change governance,urban transitions
Projet ERC : ViEWS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Uppsala University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2375718.25 €

The challenges of preventing, mitigating, and adapting to large-scale political violence are daunting, particularly when violence escalates where it is not expected. Early-warning systems of sufficient quality and transparency do not exist, limiting the ability of the international community to effectively assist affected populations. We propose to develop, test, and iteratively improve a pilot Violence Early-Warning System (ViEWS) that is rigorous, data-based, and publicly available to researchers and the international community. This objective is challenging but feasible. The conflict research community has laid the ground for such a system through careful isolation of theoretically manageable sub-components of complex phenomena, and concomitant systematic, disaggregated data collection efforts. A major innovation in the project is to integrate these isolated research programs into a theoretically and methodologically consistent forecasting system, by means of dynamic simulation techniques in combination with Bayesian Model Averaging, and guided by continuous out-of-sample evaluation. This integration effort will not only allow an early-warning system of unprecedented scope and performance, but also build theoretically informative bridges between numerous compartmentalized conflict research programs. Concentrating on theoretical and methodological development, the pilot will be limited in scope to Africa but be scalable. ViEWS will provide early warnings for four forms of political violence: armed conflict involving states and rebel groups, armed conflict between non-state actors, violence against civilians, and forced population displacement, and apply these to specific actors, sub-national geographical units, and countries. Led by Håvard Hegre, the system will leverage the data resources within the Uppsala Conflict Data program, the world-leading provider of conflict data, in combination with a strong team of highly experienced conflict scholars.
Projet ERC : N2FEED (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Göttingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998500.0 €

The chemical transformation of dinitrogen is one of the most important industrial processes. Thereby produced ammonia serves as nitrogen source for almost any synthetic nitrogen containing compound, such as fertilizers or many polymers and pharmaceuticals. However, despite forcing conditions associated with high energy consumption, the Haber-Bosch process gives low yields in NH3. Hence, homogeneous, bioinspired nitrogen fixation is a longstanding goal, yet with very limited success. In this proposal, we strive to circumvent the Haber-Bosch process for the synthesis of N-containing chemicals by direct N2 functionalization upon initial splitting into molecular nitrides at ambient conditions and subsequent C–N bond formation. Catalytic platforms will be developed based on late, electron rich transition metal complexes with functional pincer ligands, which represents a fundamentally new approach for this purpose. The overall N2 functionalization effort will be broken down into three elementary steps, i.e. N2 splitting, de-/hydrogenation of metal bound N-species, and C–N bond formation. These subprojects are examined individually with a combination of modern synthetic, physical inorganic, and computational methods. These results will finally enable the rational design of homogeneous catalysts. Hence, besides the primary goal to directly use N2 as chemical feedstock this project will also serve the secondary objectives of making important contributions to related timely and challenging topics, such as C–N coupling by nitrenoid transfer or the use of nitrogen compounds, especially ammonia, as chemical fuels in energy storage applications. The previous record of my group in the chemistry of electron-rich transition metal complexes with functional pincer ligands, N2 splitting/coupling, and the activation of other N-containing small-molecules provide a strong basis for the feasibility of these challenging goals.

Mots-clés : nitrogen fixation
Projet ERC : HurdlingOxoWall (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Trinity College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499865.0 €

The chemical, pharmaceutical, and materials industries rely heavily upon chemicals from oil and natural gas feed-stocks (saturated hydrocarbons) that require considerable functionalisation prior to use. Catalytic oxidative functionalisation (e.g. CH4 + [O] + cat. → CH3OH), using first row transition metal catalysts, is potentially a sustainable, cheap, and green route to these high-commodity chemicals. However, catalytic oxidation remains a great modern challenge because such hydrocarbons contain remarkably strong inert C–H bonds that can only be activated with potent catalysts. We will take a Nature-inspired approach to designing and preparing powerful oxidation catalysts: we will interrogate the active oxidant, a metal-oxo (M=O) species, to guide our catalyst design. Specifically, we will prepare unprecedented Late first-row transition Metal-Oxo complexes (LM=O’s, LM = Co, Ni, Cu) that will activate the strongest of C–H bonds (e.g. CH4). This will be accomplished using a family of novel low coordinate ligands that will support LM=O’s. Due to their expected potent reactivity we will prepare LM=O’s under unique oxidatively robust, low-temperature conditions to ensure their stabilisation. The poorly understood factors (thermodynamics, metal, d-electron count) that control the reactivity of M=O’s will be thoroughly investigated. Based on these investigations LM=O reactivity will be manipulated and optimised. We expect LM=O’s will be significantly more reactive than any early transition metal-oxo’s (EM=O’s), because they will display a greater thermodynamic driving force for C–H activation. It is thus expected that LM=O’s will be capable of the activation of the strongest of C–H bonds (i.e. CH4). Driven by the knowledge acquired from these investigations, we will design and prepare the next generation of molecular oxidation catalysts - a family of late first-row transition metal compounds capable of catalysing hydrocarbon functionalisation under ambient conditions.

Mots-clés : metal oxo chemistry,c h activation,bioinorganic chemistry,hydrocarbon functionalisation
Projet ERC : ULTRA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : KTH Royal Institute of Technology — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KTH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The cloud computing infrastructure that logically centralizes data storage and computation for many different actors is a prime example of a key societal system. A number of time-critical applications deployed in the cloud infrastructure have to provide high reliability and throughput, along with guaranteed low latency for delivering data. This low latency guarantee is sorely lacking today, with the so-called tail-latency of slowest responses in popular cloud services being several orders of magnitude longer than the median response times. Unfortunately, simply using a network with ample bandwidth does not guarantee low latency because of problems with congestion at the intra-and inter-data center levels and server overloads. All of these problems currently render the existing cloud infrastructures unsuitable for time-critical societal applications. The reasons for unpredictable delays across the Internet and within the cloud infrastructure are numerous, but some of the key culprits are: 1) slow memory subsystems limit server effectiveness, and 2) excess buffering in the Internet further limits correlation of data requests. The aim of this project is to dramatically change the way data flows across the Internet, such that it is more highly correlated when it is to be processed at the servers. The overarching goal is to enforce a large degree of correlation in the data requests (logical units of data), both temporally (across time) and spatially (as server work units require correlation to achieve high cache hit rates). The result is that the logical units of data will be processed at almost the maximum processing speed of the cloud servers. By doing so, we will achieve an ultra-low latency Internet. This project will produce the tools and knowledge that will be key to dramatically reducing the latency of key societal services; these include cloud services used by a large number of users on a daily basis.

Mots-clés : internet,low latency,spatial correlation,scheduling,services,networks,servers,data storage,cache
Projet ERC : LISA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GSI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1996250.0 €

The coexistence of single-particle and collective degrees of freedom in atomic nuclei gives rise to various exotic phenomena. In nuclei with very asymmetric proton-to-neutron ratios, the strong nuclear interaction drives shell evolution which alters the orbital spacing, and in some cases even the ordering present in stable nuclei. In the absence of large gaps between orbitals, nuclei can take on non-spherical shapes and their excitations proceed through coherent and collective motion of many nucleons. Where and how collectivity emerges from the single-particle dynamics of protons and neutrons is an open question in nuclear structure physics that will be addressed with LISA in a unique way. The aim of the LISA (LIfetime measurements with Solid Active targets) project is to develop a novel method for lifetime measurements in atomic nuclei. Lifetimes probe the collectivity of a nucleus through its electromagnetic transition properties. The experimental approach is based on active solid targets and will dramatically enhance the scope of measurements of excited-state lifetimes and thus transition probabilities achievable in exotic nuclei. Coupled to state-of-the-art gamma-ray tracking detectors such as AGATA, this novel instrument will overcome the present challenges of lifetimes measurements with low-intensity beams of unstable nuclei. LISA will exploit the unique capabilities of FAIR, the future European fragmentation facility set to deliver the most exotic and highest intensity radioactive ion beams. LISA will greatly expand the physics program for nuclear structure studies at FAIR. Through the measurements made possible by LISA, our understanding of key aspects of single-particle and collective structures and their interplay will become much more developed. The results will have significant impact on the theoretical descriptions and modeling of atomic nuclei making their predictions more reliable.

Mots-clés : nuclear structure,exotic nuclei,radioactive beams,electromagnetic transitions,single particle,collective excitation
Projet ERC : SUPERYEAST (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VIB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The common baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is used in various industrial applications, ranging from the production of fermented beverages like beer and wine, foods including bread and chocolate, bioethanol, enzymes and pharmaceuticals. S. cerevisiae cells can grow aerobically, using the TCA cycle and electron transport chain to produce around 16 to 18 molecules of ATP (energy) per glucose molecule. However, when glucose concentrations exceed about 1% (w/w), the cells tend to shut down this respiratory mechanism in favour of alcoholic fermentation, even if this metabolic route only yields 2 ATP molecules per glucose consumed. This so-called "Crabtree effect" makes it difficult to efficiently cultivate industrial yeasts in large-scale industrial fermenters because maximal biomass yield is only obtained in conditions where glucose concentrations are kept below the critical limit for activation of the Crabtree effect, but high enough to allow maximal growth. Interestingly, however, some S. cerevisiae strains seem to be less sensitive to glucose inhibition of respiration than others, suggesting that certain natural strains harbour specific alleles that make them less subjected to Crabtree repression. In our ongoing ERC CoG, we have shown that besides limiting efficient biomass formation, the Crabtree effect also decreases the efficiency with which strains can metabolize industrial media. Moreover, we identified an as yet uncharacterised gene, YLR108C, that controls the glucose level at which respiration becomes repressed. Our preliminary results show that swapping natural alleles of YLR108C changes the level of glucose at which the Crabtree repression starts. In this PoC, we propose to use our findings to generate superior industrial yeasts that combine optimal industrial fermentation performance with more efficient biomass production. To avoid generating GM strains, we will use natural breeding and/or self-cloning techniques.

Mots-clés : yeast,fermentation,beer,wine,bread,cerevisiae,crabtree effect
Projet ERC : WellSIRe (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : European University Institute — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1872200.0 €

The concept of ‘social investment’ has gained traction in debates over welfare state futures. Like any notion of investment, social investment posits measurable ‘wellbeing returns’ on investment in advanced societies. Fundamental to any empirical assessment of social investment is the critical role of three complementary policy functions: (1) improving the stock of human capital; (2) easing the flow of gendered labour market and family life-course transitions; and (3) maintaining and updating inclusive social protection buffers, both in the present and over time. Assessing social investment ‘returns’ is complex: The multidimensional character of social investment policy interventions, their implications for different social groups, the effects of policy (in-)complementarities and interactions, and the challenge of delineating effects across different time dimensions are not properly addressed by existing research, still based on methods devised for the analysis of the industrial welfare state. WellSIRe develops a mixed methodology using five layers: (1) quantitative-macro analysis of long-term welfare performance; (2) quantitative-micro analysis of individual socioeconomic conditions over in- and out-of-work transitions; (3) quantitative-micro analyses of subjective wellbeing and capabilities over the life-course; (4) qualitative-institutional analysis of temporal sequences of national social investment reform; and (5) qualitative-institutional analysis of subnational social investment policy delivery. Each layer provides distinct inferential leverage for causal explanations about (non-)returns on social investment reform across countries, with a focus on vulnerable groups in the working-age population. The five-layered methodology will cumulatively provide new insights, ultimately allowing for a fair empirical assessment of the social investment policy paradigm in its own right.

Mots-clés : welfare state,social investment,wellbeing,policy complementarity,mixed methods,capabilities
Projet ERC : SUPERMEM (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : CNRS Innovation — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 5000.0 €

The concept we aim a proving is a novel type of electronic device, a redox superconducting memristor, whose functionality is beyond that of binary memories: it shows a continuum of states (instead of just two), and the switching between them can be driven by a sequence of voltage pulses or by visible light illumination. Furthermore, it is based on high-temperature superconductors, allowing for low-dissipation devices. This concept stems from recent work in the frame of an ERC consolidator grant, which has demonstrated the physical mechanism that produces the memristive behavior: a controlled red-ox reaction. The structural simplicity of the proposed memristor radically improves scalability and facilitates fabrication as compared to the existing approaches. The new functionalities it brings, particularly photosensitivity and the superconductivity, open new avenues in the areas of application, which include neuromorphic computing and superconducting electronics.

Mots-clés : high tc superconductors,memristors,oxide interfaces,redox