Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MEGAMAPS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de naples - l'orientale — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1478750.0 €

MEGAMAPS aims to produce a transnational in-depth study on Artivism for gender equality in the Mediterranean Arab public space after the 2011 uprisings, by using an interdisciplinary novel methodology, where History and Social Movements Theory intersect Gender studies, Visual Arts and Digital Humanities. By focusing on 4 countries (Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia) the project aims to innovate the global academic knowledge on the Arab region by the writing of an unprecedented history from below which investigates the interplay between gender, public aesthetic dissent and social change. Based on fieldwork and digital ethnography, MEGAMAPS aims to frame, explore and map emerging Artivism for gender equality, conceived as a political incubator which revitalizes an egalitarian project of society in the post-2011 authoritarian ebb. In addition to academic publications, the project aims at producing the first open access and participative digital platform which will consistently document, systematize and interconnect a corpus of living sources (visual and performative arts, oral interviews, and cartographies, maps, graphic tools) and will: a) innovate the traditional approaches of History and Social Movements Theory on the Arab region; b) provide the first research platform dealing with Artivism, gender and social change in the Arab region; c) make this corpus FAIRly accessible to academics, stakeholders and to the general public. MEGAMAPS also involves a set of dissemination activities aimed to improve activists’ participation in a transnational network of artists, researchers, policy-makers and civil society stakeholders in order to promote mutual exchanges of best practices in the field of gender equality, arts and democratic governance, and to contribute in reversing the victimization paradigm on women and sexual minorities in the Arab region by proposing an agency paradigm, which can also overcome orientalism and islamophobia within the Western public opinion.

Mots-clés : artivism gender equality middle east and north africa public space social movements
Projet ERC : EOaMS (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University College de Londres — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1442198.0 €

This project is positioned on the interface between spectral theory and geometric analysis, and is concerned with the relation between certain analytic invariants of objects (called spectra) and the shape (or geometry) of these objects. A classical example of a spectrum is a Laplacian spectrum. It is a sequence of numbers encoding the information about many physical properties of an object such as elasticity, heat and sound propagations and many others. Specifically, this project deals with the geometry of special shapes such as soap films. The geometry of soap films (the so-called minimal surfaces) is a central subject of modern geometric analysis with applications far beyond the one suggested by their name, most prominently to topology and theory of general relativity. More precisely, the project is devoted to the study of two classical topics: sharp inequalities for eigenvalues of geometric operators on manifolds and minimal surfaces. The underlying principle of the field is the correspondence between minimal surfaces and optimal metrics for such inequalities. This correspondence is both a source of many fascinating intradisciplinary connections (e.g. with analysis, geometry, algebra and theory of integrable systems) and a powerful methodological tool. A variety of methods from across mathematics can be applied to this problem and recent advances have resulted in a resolution of several classical problems on either side of the correspondence. The present project aims to build on this success story by targeting long-standing conjectures in the following directions: 1) Using the correspondence to construct many novel examples of minimal surfaces, study their geometry, and look for new patterns and phenomena; 2) Applying methods of geometric analysis to find sharp eigenvalue inequalities for classical eigenvalues problems; 3) Extending the realm of potential applications by exploring different eigenvalue problems for similar connections to geometric analysis.

Mots-clés : laplacian,eigenvalue optimisation,dirichlet to neumann map,minimal surfaces,harmonic maps
Projet ERC : PoreMADNeSS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VIB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499250.0 €

Proteins embedded in membranes play key roles in maintaining cell integrity, homeostasis and communication. Emerging technologies (nanopore sequencing, synthetic cells, …) imitate biological systems and repurpose membrane protein for the transport and sensing of new analytes through synthetic membranes. These applications have fuelled the demand for (synthetic) membrane proteins with properties and functions not observed in nature. Structure-based computational protein design is revolutionizing many aspects of biotechnology but has almost exclusively focused on protein folding in water. The aim of PoreMADNeSS is to develop innovative strategies to enable the design of transmembrane β-barrels (TMBs), a class of membrane proteins with excellent properties to act as nanopore sensors. Using multidisciplinary approaches, we will address basic biophysical knowledge gaps that currently limit TMB design. The design of TMB folding in synthetic membranes gives access to a wealth of TMB sequences and structures not sampled by nature because of constraints associated with biogenesis and with the composition of biomembranes. We propose a combination of massive parallel de novo design and adaptive machine learning to explore this unknown TMB space, to gain crucial insight into the determinants of TMB folding and to develop robust design methods. As a proof-of-concept, PoreMADNeSS will focus on the design of steroid sensing nanopores. Our strategy is to design a cortisol binding site across the transmembrane channel, which would act as the reading head for single molecule fingerprinting. My lab was first to demonstrate the feasibility of TMB design and has established a design pipeline from computation to electrophysiology and biochemical characterization. This project has all the components to translate into transformative advances in nanopore sensing and sequencing by providing the nanopore R&D community with accurate and innovational computational design methodologies.
Projet ERC : SOMATOGPS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Reaching to an object touching the body is so commonplace that we hardly give it a second thought. However, this “simple” behavior is actually an incredibly complicated problem the brain must solve on a daily basis. Somatosensory information is initially represented in neural maps whose relationship with the physical body is ambiguous. Despite this, the brain can accurately pinpoint where the object is in three-dimensional space and move the reaching hand towards it. How remains a mystery, though its solution is necessary for making concrete progress on societal issues, such as designing prosthetics that can be embodied. SOMATOGPS introduces the first neurocomputational framework aimed at solving this mystery.  My novel approach leverages an analogy with computations used by manmade positioning technology in order to gain insight into potential solutions. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) ingeniously turn localization into a problem of geometry, pinpointing an object on Earth by calculating its distance from multiple satellites. I propose that the brain uses a somatosensory version of GPS that I call the Body Positioning System (BPS). I hypothesize that like the GPS, the brain reduces localization to its geometry. By keeping track of the distances between each body part and their distances from a tactile object, the brain could compute a reach to the object. The main aim of SOMATOGPS is to characterize how the BPS is implemented by neural computations, from neural map to body movement. I will develop novel behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms to measure localization in two and three dimensions, model the underlying geometric computations and their neural implementation, and manipulate the geometry of the body in order to perturb these neural computations. This innovative proposal provides the first neurocomputational model of tactile localization, representing a new state-of-the-art in our understanding of somatosensory space.

Mots-clés : tactile perception,body representation,somatosensory cortex,neuroscience,computational models,machine learning,space,coordinate systems,reference frames,sensorimotor neuroscience
Projet ERC : HandShake (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Discovering methods that facilitate ultrafast and minimally-dissipative switching of spontaneous ordering represents one of the most prominent research directions in modern condensed matter physics. In recent years, breakthrough experiments have revealed that circularly-polarized femtosecond pulses, in the visible spectral range, can non-thermally perturb magnetization via the ultrafast inverse Faraday effect. However, the associated pathway of energy flow – from light to electrons to spins - incurs substantial parasitic energy losses while simultaneously restricting the functional duration and amplitude of the spin stimulus to the highly-limited lifetime and strength of the photo-excited electrons. Aiming to unveil an alternative and potentially superior method for the selective switching of magnetic order, this project will explore the possibility of manipulating and ultimately reversing magnetization using left- or right-handed circularly-polarized optical phonons driven at resonance. To coherently pump such phonons, this project will exploit the intense and narrow-band infrared light pulses delivered by free-electron lasers. The ensuing rotational motion of ions, in a manner analogous to the ultrafast Barnett effect, is predicted to temporarily create a magnetic moment that could be sufficiently strong enough, by virtue of the longer lifetime and non-linear character of optical phonons, to drive large-amplitude permanent reorientation of magnetization. By constructing state-of-the-art multi-color pump-probe techniques, operational in both stroboscopic and single-shot modes, the existence, character and universality of this never-seen-before source for magnetic recording and processing of data will be discovered. While the challenging and high-risk experiments proposed here explore largely-uncharted physics, they could reveal a disruptive new tool that enables the highly-efficient, ultrafast and directional switching of spontaneous order.

Mots-clés : ultrafast magnetism phononics circular polarization
Projet ERC : Saphidir (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université Paris-Saclay — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1485725.0 €

A fundamental goal of Algebraic Geometry is to classify algebraic varieties up to isomorphism. This is extremely hard, already for surfaces, and open in general. It has become clear that we can only hope for a classification up to birational maps, that is, isomorphisms between dense open sets. Understanding birational maps is therefore a key step towards the classification of algebraic varieties. For one of the largest families of algebraic varieties, so-called Mori fibre spaces, any birational map between any two of them is composed of special birational maps called Sarkisov links. For surfaces over nice fields, Sarkisov links are well-understood, but little is known about them in dimension three or higher, over any field. The understanding of Sarkisov links will mean an enormous advance in the study of birational maps and a substantial leap towards a classification of a large family of algebraic varieties. The very ambitious aim of this project is to describe all Sarkisov links completely in any dimension and in several non-classical settings in terms of base-locus, contracted hypersurfaces and induced rational map on the bases of the implicated Mori fibre spaces. If achieved, it will revolutionize the study of birational maps and provide new exciting tools to determine classes of algebraic varieties in several settings. In dimension three and higher, already the classification of Sarkisov links over the field of complex numbers is extremely ambitious. Another very difficult task is to classify Sarkisov links over a field of positive characteristic, as the geometry of algebraic varieties over such fields is even more challenging than it is over the field of complex numbers. The Minimal Model program, a major active research area in Biratonal Geometry, has made tremendous advances in the last decades. Recently developed ideas and techniques allow the attack on birational maps between algebraic varieties by studying Sarkisov links.

Mots-clés : birational geometry sarkisov programm algebraic geometry over non closed fields
Projet ERC : ADG (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université Paris-Saclay — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1415449.7 €

The aim of this project is to study a broad class of dynamical systems by using tools from the fields of harmonic analysis and PDEs (semiclassical, microlocal analysis), and to apply these new results to a variety of problems of geometric origin.  In a first part, we will mainly focus on systems exhibiting a weak hyperbolic behaviour (partially, non-uniformly hyperbolic systems) for which analytic techniques are far less understood compared to the uniformly hyperbolic setting. We plan to study statistical properties of such systems, and the regularity of solutions to transport / cohomological equations. Then, we will address rigidity questions in geometry and dynamics such as marked length spectrum or boundary / lens rigidity, Katok's entropy conjecture. In a third part, we aim to study Anosov representations and meromorphic extension of related Poincaré series via microlocal techniques. We expect the tools developed in the first part will help to understand part two and three. 1) Statistics of weakly hyperbolic flows, study of transport questions. Ergodicity, mixing, polynomial or exponential mixing of partially hyperbolic / non-uniformly hyperbolic systems. We also plan to study cohomological equations and prove Liv\v sic-type theorems. Finally, we will study equilibrium measures (existence, uniqueness, and properties) for compact extensions of Anosov diffeos / flows.  2) Geometric and dynamical rigidity for flows / actions. Marked or unmarked length spectrum rigidity conjecture for (non-)uniformly hyperbolic geodesic flows, lens and boundary rigidity, Katok's entropy rigidity conjecture, rigidity of Anosov actions (Katok-Spatzier's conjecture), Kanai's regularity conjecture. 3) Anosov representations. Spectral theory of Anosov actions on infinite volume manifolds, meromorphic extensions of Poincaré series. If finite, we aim to compute the value of these series at the spectral parameter 0.

Mots-clés : microlocal analysis,weakly hyperbolic dynamical systems,geometric rigidity,inverse problems,anosov representations
Projet ERC : PANOPLY (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inrae
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Plants use volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to continuously communicate with antagonistic organisms such as herbivore pests; and mutualistic organisms such as natural enemies of the pests, and pollinators. But we only know the basics of this communication and most of the studies come from laboratory experiments involving only pairwise or at most three-species interactions. How VOCs mediate multitrophic plant-insect interactions in field conditions remain massively unknown. In PANOPLY, I will be the first one to study how VOCs shape plant-insect interactions in an unpresented long-term scale from the lab to the field. I will use the scientifically and economically important perennial system of grapevine (Vitis vinifera), and the leafhopper pest Scaphoideus titanus, which is the main insect vector of Flavescence dorée (FD); a lethal quarantine disease of threat to European grapevines. I will test VOC from aromatic plants that is a major group of plants containing VOCs that are distinct from other plant species. I will use single and mixtures of species of aromatic plants to: (1) Identify VOCs that can affect life history traits of development, host choices and reproduction of grapevine leafhopper; (2) Validate in the greenhouse and on common garden experiments, how VOCs affect insect’s behaviour and survival; (3) Test aromatic plants in analytical field experiments over the long term to understand the role of VOCs on mediating multitrophic plant-insect interactions. PANOPLY will be the first demonstration of how VOCs shape multitrophic plant-insect interactions in perennial plants answering this significant knowledge gap. PANOPLY will (i) reveal the mechanisms of plant-mediated cues and their long-term effects on plant-insect interactions, (ii) open new avenues for research in chemical ecology and agroecology, and (iii) enhance crop health and insect’s biodiversity by preventing plant disease outbreaks through biological pest control and zero-pesticides use.

Mots-clés : chemical ecology,multitrophic interactions,agroecology,behavioural ecology
Projet ERC : EvoMorphoCell (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Institut Pasteur — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1492753.0 €

My work concerns a critical question: How did the cellular mechanisms underpinning animal morphogenesis first evolve? While the first multicellular ancestors of modern animals have left limited fossil traces, insights can be gained by studying their closest living relatives: the choanoflagellates. This group of microeukaryotes has several features of high relevance to animal origins, including temporal cell differentiation, facultative multicellularity, and a metazoan-like "developmental gene toolkit". Importantly, they have become amenable to functional genetics in the past few years. We will study the molecular and cellular mechanisms of three morphogenetic processes in choanoflagellates: (1) the formation of the "collar complex", a ring of microvilli surrounding the flagellum, which represents an example of complex single-cell morphogenesis and has been central to hypotheses about animal origins; (2) the molecular control of the differentiation of choanoflagellates into amoeboid cells under confinement, which I recently discovered and whose mechanisms remain unknown; (3) the cellular basis of adhesion and inversion in sheet colonies of the multicellular species Choanoeca flexa which I recently co-discovered. These three processes will be characterized by multiomic approaches which will allow unbiased comparisons with the growing dataset of molecular atlases for animal cell types. We will perform knockout, chemical inhibition, and fluorescent tagging of candidate genes identified by omics and/or known to play important roles in animals, including structural genes (such as those encoding cytoskeletal and adhesion proteins) and components of signalling pathways. Results will be analyzed in a rigorous phylogenetic framework. This project has the potential to answer long-standing questions on the pre-metazoan function of developmental genes and to inform the mechanistic basis of the transition from cell shape to organism shape in both development and evolution.

Mots-clés : morphogenesis,mechanobiology,pattern formation,evo devo,evolutionary developmental biology,evolutionary cell biology
Projet ERC : EpidemioCene (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inrae
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 624006.0 €

The frequency of infectious disease emergence has increased over the last decades, a phenomenon attributed to modern global sociodemographic and environmental changes. However, major transformations of human lifestyles and technologies associated with large-scale repercussions on the planet's ecosystems have occurred since prehistory. Measuring the epidemiological impacts of these changes on large time scales could provide precious lessons to anticipate the consequences of ongoing processes. Recent advances in the field of paleogenetics have opened promising perspectives in this regard by allowing the identification of various pathogens from skeletal remains dating back several millennia. The use of ancient DNA evidence for quantitative assessments of past disease distribution and determinants has, however, largely been missing so far. With this project, my group will leverage tens of thousands of ancient DNA libraries and sequencing datasets produced during recent years at the host and partner institutions to undertake large-scale paleoepidemiological investigations covering the past 12,000 years of human history in western Eurasia. Novel laboratory, bioinformatic and statistical approaches will be developed to maximize pathogen detection sensitivity and estimate variations in disease frequency from ancient metagenomic data while accounting for expected sources of biases. This will be combined with epidemiological modelling and phylodynamic analyses of large sets of ancient pathogen genomes to unveil paleoepidemiological dynamics and their associations with sociocultural transitions and environmental changes throughout the Holocene. This project will provide unprecedented insights into the inseparable history of humans and their pathogens, a multi-millennial perspective on current global health challenges, and strong foundations for future paleoepidemiological studies.