Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : REEL-EM (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
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 : 1723334.0 €

A perfect macromolecular structure would provide an all-atom description of the molecule, including not only the well-ordered polypeptide or polynucleotide framework but all other species: metals and other ions, cofactors, lipids, substrates and inhibitors. However, current structural data include no or very little information on elemental composition, leading to significant errors and omissions in atomic models. To address this issue, I propose to develop a method, Reconstructed Electron Energy Loss - Elemental Mapping (REEL-EM), that will map elemental distribution within macromolecular complexes by bringing together well-established principles in analytical electron microscopy (EM) and biological cryogenic EM. Atomic-resolution elemental mapping in the electron microscope is well established for dose-tolerant samples. Electron Energy Loss (EEL) techniques capture information from inelastic scattering events in the sample, and energy losses are characteristic of the element and chemical state of the scattering atom. These techniques require a high electron dose to achieve useable signal-to-noise ratio, severely limiting their application to biological samples. Our novel approach combines the image processing tools of single-particle cryo-EM with EEL techniques, allowing us to add EEL signal in the 3D particle space, effectively dividing the dose required for sensitive elemental analysis between many images. Preliminary work in my research group confirms that our proposed approach is valid - we are able to generate maps of specific elements in the 3D particle space. I propose to extend this early work to achieve single-atom detection at 1-nm spatial resolution in the course of this five-year project. Our work will characterise and optimise all aspects of data collection and processing for REEL-EM. We will apply our methodology to two important macromolecular complexes: the skeletal muscle ryanodine receptor and the mitochondrial F-type ATP synthase.

Mots-clés : cryo electron microscopy,single particle analysis,electron energy loss spectroscopy,stem eels,elemental analysis,analytical electron microscopy,metals in biology,ion channels
Projet ERC : COCOCIMO (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
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 : 1809735.0 €

The ambitious goal of this project is to create an enantiomer-pure beam of chiral molecules, starting from a racemic sample, using an experimental coherent state preparation scheme. The basic elements of the proposed experiments are the following. A cold, gas-phase beam of chiral molecules is created via supersonic jet expansion. Two levels of a triad of rotational states that are connected via electric dipole allowed transitions are emptied using resonant UV depletion in combination with simultaneous microwave repumping. Driving a closed triad of rotational transitions using microwaves prepares a chosen internal quantum state of the chiral molecules enantiomer-specifically. This is called enantiomer-specific state transfer; a new method, that I co-developed. After coherence preparation using collimation, state-selective matter-wave diffraction is accomplished using a resonant, absorptive optical grating. The diffracted enantiomer-pure beam is detected state-selectively using 2D planar laser-induced fluorescence detection. Eventually, this beam can be used for further spectroscopic or scattering studies or for depositing the enantiopure sample on a surface. The scheme that is to be demonstrated in COCOCIMO will be applicable to any chiral molecule.

Mots-clés : chirality matter wave interferometry enantiomer separation cold molecules
Projet ERC : ProtecTHY (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2175054.0 €

Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (alloHSCT) is a common, often last-resort treatment for haematological diseases, but it is plagued by long-term morbidity and high mortality. Direct alloHSCT-induced damage to the thymus and subsequent loss of thymopoiesis, ie the production of new T cells, is considered one of the main reasons for these complications. Our limited understanding of how the thymus is damaged during alloHSCT restricts the development of thymus-protecting protocols. The goal of ProtecTHY is to unravel the intrinsic protective mechanisms of the human thymus and assess how alloHSCT affects them, with the ultimate objective of devising measures to prevent thymic damage. We take advantage of an innovative whole organ culture system for the human thymus developed in my laboratory and our extensive pre-existing collection of human thymus tissue samples spanning a diverse age range. ProtecTHY specifically aims to 1) discover how the thymus protects itself from external insults over the course of the human lifetime, 2) reveal how alloHSCT disrupts the human thymus microanatomy and how that damage can be prevented with a cellular therapy, and 3) examine how thymic damage affects the circulating true naive T cells and if existing clinical treatments for alloHSCT complications can restore the loss of thymopoiesis. We will apply state-of-the-art spatial and single-cell multiomics to dissect these protective layers of the thymus both ex vivo and after alloreactive challenge in vitro. Moreover, by testing the effect of treatments already in clinical use, ProtecTHY can resolve their specific mechanisms of action and impact on the thymus. Our results are thus directly translatable to the human condition and can direct future treatments to enhance outcomes following alloHSCT. As a translational immunologist and clinical microbiologist with extensive experience in human thymus research, I am well equipped to uncover the mechanisms of thymic protection.

Mots-clés : the human thymus,allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation,graft versus host disease
Projet ERC : AI-EMOTION (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498983.0 €

Emotions are an integral part of learning. While the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in learning processes is constantly growing, critical gaps remain in understanding its impact on students’ emotions, wellbeing, and ultimately, learning outcomes. The AI-EMOTION project aims to uncover the potential and pitfalls of AI that extend beyond cognitive learning outcomes by investigating the affective processes and mechanisms of such technology-mediated learning. By employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates educational sciences, computer science, and psychophysiology, the project seeks to understand the complex daily dynamics between technology-mediated learning, academic emotions, and students’ well-being. To ensure robust results in real-world settings, students’ emotional experiences and related physiological states are captured across authentic learning situations in real-time using smartphone questionnaires and wearable biometric sensors. The resulting data will provide a rich information source for analysing within-person emotional processes and individual and group-level differences, covering three educational levels from middle school to university. The findings of the AI-EMOTION project are expected to generate new theoretical leads for both academic emotion and human-computer interaction research. Furthermore, the project will develop novel multimodal methods for emotional data collection and analysis, making significant methodological contributions to the interdisciplinary science of human emotions. Ultimately, AI-EMOTION will provide insights for designing AI tools that are not only cognitively effective but also emotionally supportive for learners.

Mots-clés : academic emotions,digital learning technology,ai in education
Projet ERC : FLAIR (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université Ben Gourion du Néguev — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Artificial intelligence (AI) is envisioned to play a key role in future wireless technologies, with deep neural networks (DNNs) enabling digital receivers to learn to operate in challenging communication scenarios. However, wireless receiver design poses unique challenges that fundamentally differ from those encountered in traditional deep learning domains. The main challenges arise from the dynamic nature of wireless communications, which causes continual changes to the data distribution, combined with the limited power and computational resources of wireless devices. These challenges impair conventional AI based on offline trained massive DNNs. Our ambitious goal is to introduce a new form of flexible lightweight AI that is particularly tailored for wireless communications. Our approach is based on a holistically revisiting the three fundamental pillars of AI – the architecture, dictating the family of learned mappings; the training algorithm that tunes the architecture; and the data based on which learning is carried out. Accordingly, we focus on three objectives – 1) design trainable receiver architectures that are lightweight and support adaptation to rapid channel variations; 2) establish a new learning paradigm that deviates from conventional training, and is based on viewing continual learning as a dynamic system; and 3) propose techniques to accumulate online data sets that are sufficiently informative for learning purposes while being small enough not to induce notable complexity in training. This is a fundamental depart from conventional deep learning, based on highly-parameterized DNNs trained with massive data sets using lengthy learning procedures. Our preliminary data show that this paradigm shift achieves substantial performance, robustness, and complexity gains over conventional deep receivers. The project will transform how communications systems are studied, and profoundly impact a multitude of applications that rely on wireless communications.

Mots-clés : wireless communications,deep learning,dynamic channels,receivers
Projet ERC : AtmosCOC (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496886.0 €

Atmospheric aerosol particles have a critical impact on Earth’s radiative balance and human health. Oxygenated organic molecules play an important role in the formation and growth of aerosol particles. To contribute to initial steps of particle formation, a compound must either condense from the gas to the particle phase or undergo cluster-phase proton-transfer or other chemical reaction. I define a clusterable organic compound (COC) to be an oxygenated organic molecule which can participate stable cluster formation under atmospheric conditions. Due to the limited knowledge of the formation, structures, and properties of COCs, the exact mechanisms for the formation of aerosol particles remain puzzling. My vision to bridge this long-lasting knowledge gap is to implement a unique computational approach to tackle bottlenecks in studies of complex reaction mechanisms, to combine a versatile suite of quantum chemical methods to accurately investigate cluster formation and properties, and to combine the best qualities of mass spectrometry and matrix isolated vibrational spectroscopy to solve structures directly from the reaction chamber. The scientific objectives are to 1) solve the role of dimerization-initiated autoxidation mechanism in COC formation, 2) develop an instrumentation capable to reveal molecular structures and properties of COCs, 3) determine the formation mechanisms and rates of COC containing particles, and 4) estimate the atmospheric impact of newly formed COC containing particles. This project will establish the molecular-level foundation for future atmospheric research by solving how COCs form, what is their contribution to particle formation and properties, and what is their impact for our climate. This research results highly accurate reaction kinetics and cluster thermodynamics parameters for atmospheric models, which are crucial to constrain the large uncertainty in climate predictions caused by small aerosol particles.

Mots-clés : aerosols,reaction mechanisms,computational chemistry
Projet ERC : MaMas (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université de Roskilde — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499955.0 €

Many mothers in Western Europe experience some distress during the times of pregnancy, birth and postpartum, a period called “matrescence”. Although health, social and welfare laws offer some protection and accommodation to women during matrescence, the approach is fragmented and incomplete. The law has yet to address issues such as early pregnancy loss, obstetric violence, and the “motherhood penalty” at work. These experiences have been under-explored and under-theorised in law and feminist legal theory, despite their implications for the rights to health, non-discrimination, dignity, autonomy, work and equality. The lack of a holistic approach to maternal rights during matrescence represents a major problem for women’s rights and gender equity in Europe. The overall aim of MaMas is to develop a first legal framework of maternal rights during matrescence, anchored in women’s embodied experiences of matrescence, and to re-imagine rights from their vantage point. Using legal comparative methods and socio-legal methods, MaMas maps and analyzes health, labor, and welfare laws at national, regional and international levels to uncover which rights women have during this transition. Through qualitative methods, it investigates women’s experiences of matrescence, including their experience of rights. Based on the legal and qualitative analyses, the project identifies gaps in the current legal approach, develops new legal language and concepts to translate women’s experiences into law, and explores risks of essentialization.  MaMas breaks new theoretical ground by constructing a legal theory of maternal rights during matrescence. Using a gender embodiment lens, it explores for the first time new pathways for the recognition of women’s rights during matrescence. This includes the development of new legal concepts and language, such as inter-dependency rights, right to time, respectful corporal rights, and the interrogation of the legal status of unpaid childcare work.

Mots-clés : rights pregnancy birth postpartum motherhood health law labor law,welfare law feminist legal theory gender embodiment
Projet ERC : IRRITATION (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499738.0 €

Irritation is a pervasive feature of the human experience, and of human sociality in particular, yet it has been very little studied by social and natural scientists. Research on irritation as it bears on interpersonal relationships, rather than as a physical reaction to a sensory experience, is particularly thin. This project investigates irritation as a feature of human sociality in diverse cultural contexts, with a particular focus on issues related to cooperation and morality. It brings together methods and approaches from anthropology and psychology, combining in-depth ethnographic research in four culturally distinct environments with methods of systematic experimental comparison. The primary aim of this project is to develop a comprehensive account of irritation that brings together the social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of it, and of emotional life more generally. The secondary aim is to bring the analysis of irritation into dialogue with the analysis of two fundamental features of human sociality: cooperation and morality. On the one hand, it might be felt that irritation is a threat to our close relationships; that if taken too far it will compromise the very patterns of cooperation and care on which these relationships depend. And yet the pervasiveness of irritation, not least among very close kin, suggests something else: that in some sense we may need irritation – even that it is a constitutive feature of human sociality. Investigating the role irritation plays in the maintenance and disintegration of cooperative relationships, and in moral judgements, will enlarge our understanding of the emotional side of human sociality. This pioneering work will develop a sophisticated, culturally grounded theory of irritation, capable of entering into critical dialogue with mainstream psychological and evolutionary theories of human sociality, and make broader methodological contributions to studies of intimate experience and emotional life.

Mots-clés : irritation,sociality,emotion,cooperation,morality,mixed method,psychological anthropology,ethnography,experiments,cross cultural comparison
Projet ERC : ELBOW (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499775.0 €

Scientific knowledge has long been understood to be subjective and situated. ELBOW examines this situatedness from a previously unexplored historical viewpoint by investigating the role of lay embodied experiences in eighteenth-century scientific knowledge construction. The project starts from the premise that knowledge is necessarily filtered through individuals’ embodied cognition and therefore tactile, sensory, and experiential. Using eighteenth-century medical electricity as an empirical case study, the project analyses how patients’ embodied and experiential knowledge influenced the medical knowledge emerging from electrotherapies, as well as whose experiences and ways of knowing ended up contributing to scientific knowledge. As a novel experimental therapy, medical electricity provides an exceptional window into practices of knowledge construction, authorisation, and marginalisation. Since electrical treatments and the bodily sensations they created were meticulously recorded by doctors and patients alike, these descriptions can be analysed as repositories of experiences and understandings of embodiment as well as epistemological beliefs regarding body, life, and matter. Medical electricity offers the perfect vantage point for examining popular epistemological understandings, their interaction with scientific epistemologies, and the way they manifested themselves in electrotherapeutic practices. ELBOW devises an innovative methodological approach to tease out patients’ embodied experiences and epistemological beliefs from a variety of sources, including scientific treatises, doctors’ casebooks, advertisements, fiction, and ego-documents. Combining phenomenology and cognitive science with history of medicine methods, the project proposes a new, theoretically sophisticated approach to analysing historical everyday experiences and embodied knowledge—and thereby a turn towards a new experiential paradigm in history of knowledge.

Mots-clés : medical electricity,history of knowledge,gender and embodiment,eighteenth century europe and atlantic world
Projet ERC : MiCRoARTiS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Coimbra — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1856793.0 €

MiCRoARTiS is the blueprint for a five-year program of frontier research to develop a sophisticated spectroscopic approach to study artificial molecular motors. The ultimate goal will be to demonstrate the harnessing of conformational dynamics of molecular motors in the gas phase using microwave spectroscopy. My recent research has shown we can measure broadband microwave spectra of molecular motors in idle mode. Such achievement was remarkable not only because rotationally resolved studies of molecules of this size were out of reach until now, but also because it opens a gateway to a new research line that is risky and ambitious, but its potential is clear. Emerging from a static frame to studies of molecular motors in action in the gas phase will unlock their structural dynamics with unprecedented control over the environment. Molecular nanotechnology will gain a new experimental tool that is highly compatible with theoretical modelling approaches. The significance of this project emerges from the current lack of high-resolution probes that are able to capture a complete structural picture of the mechanical steps of these architectures. An evolved structure-solving tool will be developed, exploiting the unrivalled abilities of microwave spectroscopy to recover three-dimensional structures from rotationally resolved spectra. The virtual isolation created in gas phase molecular ensembles will be exploited to disclose intrinsic and interfacial structural manoeuvres of molecular motors. For the first time, rotationally resolved studies of molecular motors will be carried out in geared-mode, and in the gas phase. A new technology for thermal and optical control of samples will be developed to augment the molecular library at reach, carving a path for this methodology to extend beyond the five-year lifetime of the project. A new vision for spectroscopy of artificial molecular machinery will emerge and significantly advance this frontier of research.

Mots-clés : microwave spectroscopy molecular motors