Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : ForCry (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
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 : 1451069.0 €

Knowledge of past concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) has transformed our understanding of earth’s climate: past, present, and future. Ice cores have yielded 800,000 years of high resolution and high precision data, revolutionising Earth system science. Marine sediment records provide the opportunity for highly resolved records of ocean and past ocean pH (and therefore ocean and atmosphere CO2 content) over millions of years by means of the δ11B-pH proxy, but present progress is currently hampered by large sample size requirements and intensive laboratory techniques limiting throughput and applicability. Innovation is therefore required to answer a number of key questions, including: ‘how do spatial variations in ocean carbon flux cause natural climate variability?’, and ‘does climate sensitivity vary with background state?’ By analysing small samples frozen into a blank-free ice puck, ForCry exploits the increased sensitivity of laser ablation δ11B analysis to enable the next generation of past climate data to be recovered. This novel approach allows analyses to be conducted on ≤20 individual plankton representing a ~10–fold reduction in sample size, but while maintaining precision. Additionally, this approach removes costly chemical purification steps and leads to higher throughput which makes high-resolution CO2 reconstructions using the δ11B-pH proxy a viable option to augment and extend the ice core CO2 records. ForCry has 4 objectives: i) to develop this novel technique and optimise the hardware for efficient data collection from carbonates and other archives: ii) to calibrate through culture and field sample collection the δ11B-pH proxy in multiple species of foraminifera: iii) to map ocean pH change in four dimensions using a data inversion model; and iv) to reconstruct CO2 change at high resolution over key past intervals (e.g. Mid-Miocene) that are highly relevant to a warm future, thus probing the state dependency of climate sensitivity.

Mots-clés : carbon cycle,boron isotopes,carbon dioxide,pleistocene,neogene
Projet ERC : WANDA (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : European Southern Observatory — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ESO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1437941.0 €

When and how did the multitude of observed exo-planets form? The WANDA project aims at tackling this central question by investigating the origin of the ring-like and asymmetric structures observed in protoplanetary disks, the cradle of planets, and pushing such studies to the distant and massive star-forming regions, the locations that best represent the natal environments of the known exo-planets. The WANDA team will employ a novel multi-wavelength and multi-technique observational approach, based on a combination of high-resolution spectroscopy, spatially resolved integral field spectroscopy, and high spatial resolution imaging at near-infrared and millimeter wavelengths. My on-going Large Program at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), together with my VLT/MUSE data, and additional data to be acquired, will be combined to a number of on-going Large and normal Programs on VLT/SPHERE and ALMA. The three PhD students and two Post-docs hired in the WANDA team will work on four work packages, aimed at answering the following specific questions: - Are large cavities and rings observed in disks related to the presence of substantial winds? - Does the presence of planets in disks leave significant imprint on the accretion of material onto the star? - How do externally photoevaporating winds impact the properties of disks and how can we detect them? - How is planet formation in massive star-forming regions different than in nearby low-mass regions? WANDA will push to find a relation between the observed disk structures and the presence of disk winds, or planets, to guide us to better plan future searches for exo-planets in disks. With a better understanding on how to distinguish winds driven by massive nearby stars from those arising from the disk, WANDA will pave the way to explore massive star-forming regions with current and future telescopes, such as ELT and JWST. The quest to understand our origin in the cosmos will be a significant step closer with the WANDA project.

Mots-clés : protoplanetary disks disk winds
Projet ERC : Sentrix (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Institute of Criminology — Pays : Slovénie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1598495.0 €

The act of sentencing represents a critical juncture at which the power of the state to punish intersects with the personal freedoms of the individual. It is governed by an intricate set of decision-making dynamics, for which we lack a cohesive understanding. This ground-breaking project seeks to fill this gap by introducing a fresh perspective rooted in choice architecture, aiming to devise a comprehensive theoretical matrix that systematically captures the multi-dimensional nature of sentencing decisions. Employing the notion of the decision-making environment, the project seeks to map out the "sentencing environment" – a concept that includes both well-researched elements like judicial discretion and less examined factors such as procedural nuances and habitual decisions. The objective is to move beyond the dichotomy of legal vs. non-legal factors, using choice architecture in a non-traditional way: not to guide decisions but to understand the sentencing landscape and its mechanics. The methodology encompasses a metanalysis of existing literature supplemented by workshops, and testing the initial findings through courtroom observation, interviews, and experiments with practitioners to develop a typology of sentencing frameworks. These will be tested against real-world practices and subjected to computer simulations using agent-based modeling, providing a visual representation of the sentencing environment. The project is pioneering for several reasons. Firstly, it unites fragmented research into a holistic picture, employing an interdisciplinary approach that promises greater transparency in sentencing. Secondly, it uses visualization and simulation as tools for communication and strategic reform, potentially influencing legal and policy directions. Lastly, it offers insights into how various sentencing dimensions interact with human decision-making, contributing to a fairer justice system and a deeper understanding of legal behaviour.

Mots-clés : punishment,sentencing,decision making,judges,prosecutors
Projet ERC : NEURO-SOCIETY (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Institut du cerveau — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : ICM
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 103600.0 €

In social species, peers represent a major part of the external environment and adaptation to the environment requires adaptation to peers. One striking example is that not only other species can be deadly predators, but members from our own society can pose a deadly threat to us. On the other hand, not only family members can be our allies but also friends we choose from non-kin related group members. This matter of fact exemplifies the importance of tracking others and their relations, and possessing a structured knowledge about our societies. Primates, including humans and monkeys, spend most of their time watching others. While several neural circuits for social perception have been unraveled in their brains, we don’t know how neural circuits further transform social percepts into a meaningful set of social concepts used spontaneously to represent social networks. This question calls for an investigation at multiple levels. An exploratory approach at the whole brain level, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in monkeys and humans, will enable us to chart the brain territories involved in processing social concepts of increasing levels of abstraction, whereby concepts about individuals are less abstract than concepts about relationships, which are in turn less abstract than concepts about social networks topology. Next, a nailed down approach to the level of neurons, using fMRI-guided neurophysiology, will enable us to understand the neuronal network mechanisms by which the transformation from multi-sensory social percepts to social concepts is implemented. Finally, exploiting real-world social knowledge of semi-free ranging monkeys, will enable us to track the encoding of social network topology by neuronal networks. Understanding how neural circuits and single-neurons within these circuits are encoding social networks will provide fundamental mechanistic insights into the toolkit for smoothly maneuvering our primate societies.

Mots-clés : non human primates monkey fmri neurophysiology faces social interactions social networks multi sensory processing neuroethology
Projet ERC : Self-Flow (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting 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 : 1499179.0 €

Liquid flows in vascular networks are among the most effective ways to transport matter and information for life. Artificial vascular networks have mimicked this strategy without reproducing the same level of autonomy and adaptability. From animals to fungi, the most adaptable organisms control fluid transport with vessels that actively contract upon local sensing of stimuli. This adaptative fluid transport enables functionalities in organisms such as autonomous locomotion toward objectives. How are the orientation and rate of fluid flows controlled by self-contractions? How do these self-contracting networks tailor autonomous functionalities? So far, we do not know. Studies on organisms are limited to observations and lack the systematical characterizations required to apply these observations to artificial materials. Self-Flow hypothesizes that artificial vascular networks containing distributed sensors and actuators can decipher how self-contractions enable adaptable fluid transport. From there, materials containing self-contracting artificial vascular networks will enable systematical studies on the emergence of autonomous functionalities. With this experimental asset reinforced by theoretical and numerical models, my group and I will address the following questions: • Q1 DELIVER: How do self-contractions transport fluids across networks? • Q2 ADAPT: How do self-contractions autonomously adapt to the need of the network? • Q3 BEHAVE: How do self-contractions enable living matter functionalities?  Self-Flow will combine active matter and mechanistic approaches to model fluid transport in self-contracting vascular networks. I will use these results to design active vascularized materials that use fluid transfer to autonomously locomote towards objectives and exchange information with their pairs. This will open the way to autonomous robots that can change shape, split or recombine like soft materials and develop functionalities beyond locomotion.

Mots-clés : mechanics of active materials,fluid structure interactions,soft matter,bio inspiration
Projet ERC : METACAM (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CRAG
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Rising heatwaves and drought are severely affecting the capacity of crops to retain water and capture CO2 during photosynthesis, resulting in global yield reductions. One of the most promising approaches to enhance crop production in stressful conditions is to synthetically modify the photosynthetic capacity of plants. In nature, some lineages have evolved mechanisms like C4 photosynthesis and the Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) to cope with some of these aspects; While C4 species are extremely efficient at CO2 fixation but vulnerable to severe drought, CAM plants are less productive but very capable of coping with significant drought periods. Engineering a joint C4-CAM system that uses CAM features to fight drought, while still relying on the power of C4 can be a game-changer to increase crop resilience. For decades, the coexistence of C4 and CAM was considered incompatible in nature. An exception to the rule is found in the genus Portulaca where C4 species can trigger CAM when droughted. Despite the huge bioengineering potential of Portulaca, the molecular enablers that allow for C4-CAM to exist in this clade remain elusive. Previous phylogenetic and morphological studies across Portulaca indicate the combined C4 (Kranz anatomy) and CAM (succulence) leaf anatomy might be the main facilitator of C4-CAM. By combining anatomical studies, cell specific metabolomics and genomics with synthetic biology, I aim to identify the basic molecular determinants of the C4-CAM switch in Portulaca, and to leverage this knowledge to transfer CAM anatomical features to C4 species outside Portulaca as a proof of principle. This will set the basis for new rounds of engineering to achieve a fully functional C4-CAM switch. METACAM will provide a quantum leap to our understanding on how incompatible metabolic pathways can be designed, built and integrated in multicellular organisms which is broadly applicable to crop engineering.
Projet ERC : GutSense (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Institut du cerveau — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ICM
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1929674.0 €

A series of tightly controlled processes ensure that energy is either stored or consumed within an organism. This control is central to survival and prosperity of the animal, yet we only partly understand it. Communication between the brain and the gut, the so called “brain-gut axis”, has emerged as a key player in regulating aspects of animal physiology by directly affecting energy stores. Nevertheless, due to the astonishing anatomical complexity of the underlying neural circuits in mammals, an in depth understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms controlling this axis is still lacking. Using the simpler yet functionally comparable Drosophila brain-gut axis as a model system, I have recently shown that adult enteric neurons are functionally plastic. This constitutes a physiological feature highly relevant for the adjustment of food intake by the animal to meet energy demands. I explored this in females in the context reproduction, where mechanisms underlying appetite regulation are evolutionary conserved across multiple species. Building on my expertise, I will now investigate the long-standing question on how environmental factors, such as dietary habits or levels of physical activity, impact the function of the brain-gut axis. For GutSense, I will leverage the unique experimental opportunities available in Drosophila to address the role of gut-neurons in metabolic adaptation: (a) characterize neurons which respond to these environmental cues, and the relevant neural circuits and mediators (b) identify the target tissues and the nature of inter-organ signals involved (c) investigate the impact of timing and duration of exposure to these factors, on metabolic adaptation. Through these, I will uncover basic and likely evolutionary conserved mechanisms and better understand the context-dependent tolerance of metabolic challenges. Such insight can lead the way in elucidating the contribution of brain-gut networks to the development of pathophysiology.

Mots-clés : inter organ communication,neuron,gut,homeostasis,energy balance,adult organ development
Projet ERC : OBELiSC (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
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 : 1500000.0 €

Over the past few decades, our use of networks such as the Internet underwent a complete transformation: the data that we send over the network is now routinely used in computations by third parties. This creates a considerable threat to our privacy, as we witness countless data breaches and companies selling our private data.  The aim of secure computation is to solve this problem. It studies the design of methods for computing on sensitive data without compromising confidentiality. Secure computation has been firmly established as one of the most promising approaches to reconcile the use of data-driven algorithms with the necessity of protecting our privacy. It has spurred a considerable research effort in the past decade, which has witnessed the emergence of new models, such as the models of secure computation with silent preprocessing (introduced by the PI), and of non-interactive secure computation.  While these silent and non-interactive features are fundamental for the deployment of secure computation over large networks, current protocols suffer from important downsides which make them entirely impractical in real-world scenarios:  - They scale poorly with the number of participants and cannot be used over mid- to large-size networks. - They either require many rounds of interaction (hence are impractical over high-latency networks) or trade non-interactivity for huge computational costs. - They induce a large communication overhead compared to executing the computation on the clear data. - They are often based on exotic cryptographic assumptions, whose security is not yet well-understood.  The aim of the project OBELiSC is to explore the current limits of silent and non-interactive protocols, and to introduce new methods for overcoming the remaining barriers. The long-term vision of the project is to enable the deployment of a large-scale network that further protects our sensitive data whenever it is used in distributed computation.

Mots-clés : secure computation,multiparty computation
Projet ERC : DYNACO (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
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 : 1562501.0 €

Meiotic crossovers make us unique. Their distribution along chromosomes dictates which traits will be reassorted to create new and unique allele combinations on which selection can act. Early during meiosis, a large number of recombination interactions are initiated all across the genome, but only a few ultimately mature into crossovers. The final number and positions of crossovers are tightly regulated: along each chromosome, crossovers tend to be evenly spaced. This phenomenon, called crossover interference, was discovered in 1914 by Sturtevant and Morgan while drawing the first recombination map in flies. Emergence of spatial patterning requires communication. But how does the crossover formation machinery communicate with neighboring crossovers half a chromosome away? Our understanding of how this communication is established has been hindered by the limited resolution in time provided by classical cytology, giving us access to only snapshots of the process. In the DYNACO project, I will develop innovative solutions to explore the dynamics of crossover designation and interference. Using gentle live super-resolution microscopy combined with groundbreaking genetic and optogenetic tools in a very amenable system, the filamentous fungus Sordaria macrospora, I will address the following questions: (i) How do pro-crossover factors behave dynamically to enact and respond to crossover interference? (ii) What is the medium supporting crossover communication? (iii) What are the consequences of locally disrupting this communication?  The DYNACO project will provide fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of crossover formation, designation and interference. We will confront and reconcile many aspects of current models for crossover interference, and develop our own unified model. This work also has the potential to provide tools for the manipulation of recombination, to accelerate the introgression of selective traits into elite crop genomes.

Mots-clés : meiosis,recombination
Projet ERC : POROLEAF (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Office national d’études et de recherches aérospatiales — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ONERA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499942.0 €

Turbulent combustion of fossil fuel remains an important source of energy creation and propulsion worldwide, generating pollutant emissions endangering both human health and climate. A major factor inhibiting the mitigation of emissions pertains to combustion instabilities, i.e.: large pressure oscillations resulting from a coupling between unsteady combustion and pressure waves. Carrying out the combustion within porous inert media holds great promise for lean combustion, owing notably to a strong heat recirculation effect occurring inside them. Despite the recognition that porous materials are natural wave absorbers, very little has been studied so far regarding the potential synergy between combustion instabilities and porous media. POROLEAF aims to pioneer the field of research residing at the intersection between the disciplines of waves, turbulent combustion, and porous media. A new set of scientific challenges will be introduced, related to the complex flow physics involved in porous media combustion, as well as the difficulty of accessing the physical fields within the pore matrix. To tackle these challenges, I will build on the skills developed during my thesis in the characterization of porous media microstructure, as well as recent advances in 3D printing technology for heat resistant materials, to create porous samples allowing optical access. This will pioneer the way for a new set of state-of-the-art experiments. I aim to leverage decades of previous work in combustion instabilities and focus on the new behaviors introduced by porous media. In particular, the effects of turbulence, entropy, vaporization, and flame dynamics will need to be re-evaluated in light of porous media interactions. The improved knowledge of these principles will enable unprecedented understanding of the influence of porous media properties on the nonlinear flame response. This will directly assist in the design of cleaner and more stable combustion processes.

Mots-clés : porous media,combustion instabilities,waves,flames