Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : HAVEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, 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 : 2018846.0 €

Oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth's surface and generate particles in the atmosphere that are viewed as a core component of the climate system, especially due to their role in marine cloud formation and the strong control they have on their ability to reflect sunlight to space. With our recent findings, we have made great progress in documenting the formation of new particles by nucleation of low volatile gas-phase species in the lowest altitudes of the open ocean atmosphere and its relation to water biogeochemistry. Nucleation is however expected to be promoted at higher altitudes, in the marine free troposphere (MFT), and the entrainment of growing particles formed in the MFT is further suspected to be a major source of low-level marine cloud forming particles. Yet, because of limited observations, very little is known about MFT nucleation, which contributes to major uncertainties both in the assessment of present-day radiative forcing associated to aerosol-cloud interactions and in future climate projections. The main purpose of this project is to identify the species driving MFT nucleation and evaluate the impact of the process on cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) number concentration, and ultimately on marine cloud formation and properties. To achieve this goal, we will first use an innovative experimental setup consisting of a nucleation chamber filled with natural free tropospheric air coupled to state of the art instruments to identify the nature of the nucleating species. Experiments will be performed on Reunion Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, which is particularly sensitive to natural aerosol sources. These measurements will in a second step be used to initiate a modelling study that will further complement the observations, allowing first to evaluate the impact of MFT nucleation on the CCN population at the regional scale, and then to study in detail the impact on marine cloud formation and properties over the open ocean.

Mots-clés : marine aerosol formation nucleation free troposphere cloud condensation nuclei clouds
Projet ERC : OGRE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Instytut Biologii Doświadczalnej im. Marcelego Nenckiego — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1955000.0 €

Master transcription factors (TFs) cooperate with chromatin in regulating genomic activity in animal development and stress response. Local clustering of TFs into dense, sub-micrometer size condensates is emerging as a key feature of transcriptional regulation. This includes intranuclear condensates formed by pioneer TFs during development, transient clusters of RNA Polymerase II complex and nuclear stress bodies formed during a heat shock. Despite the ubiquity of these assemblies, we know little about the biophysical mechanism of their formation or physiological function. The last years have seen the development of new frameworks to study such transient assemblies, including various types of phase transitions and tools to probe and modulate them. However, this work has been limited mainly to cell culture and in vitro experiments that failed to incorporate the vital role of chromatin in organizing gene regulation. I propose a cross-disciplinary strategy consisting of a novel in vitro assays and functional studies in a nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to study the spatial organization of transcription in embryonic development and stress response. The specific aims are:  1. Understand the physiological relevance of transcriptional condensates in animal development and stress response.  2. Determine the molecular composition and regulators of transcriptional condensates. 3. Dissect the mechanism of transcriptional condensate formation using a novel chromatin carpet assay. We will use state-of-the-art microscopy-based tools to investigate the formation and function of nuclear condensates in developing animal embryos and develop innovative assays to probe the condensation of TFs on the surface of purified native chromatin. The obtained results will provide an unprecedented insight into the composition, assembly mechanism, and physiological relevance of biomolecular condensates formed by the transcriptional apparatus during differentiation and stress response.

Mots-clés : phase separation biomolecular condensation
Projet ERC : ATTRACTE (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 : 1499125.0 €

Planetary atmospheres are fundamental reservoirs controlling the habitability of planets. The chemical and isotopic compositions of atmospheric constituents also hold clues on the geological evolution of the entire planetary body. Today, Earth's atmosphere contains about 80% dinitrogen and 20% dioxygen. Yet, there is no scientific consensus on how and why these two molecules emerged and persisted in the Earth's atmosphere. The interactions between the atmosphere and the continental crust also play a major role in controlling the bio-availability of nutrients and the composition of the atmosphere, and thus the climate. However, the evolution of the volume of continental crust over time is strongly debated. Project ATTRACTE will significantly improve our knowledge of the main drivers of atmospheric evolution over time. This will be achieved by going back in time and following the evolution of the composition of the Earth's atmosphere over geological eons. Analyses of gases contained in traditional and new paleo-atmospheric proxies, the post-impact hydrothermal minerals, will be carried out with innovative mass spectrometry techniques. The isotopic composition of paleo-atmospheric xenon will provide new constraints on the history of hydrogen escape for the Archean Earth. Coupled argon and nitrogen measurements will allow to determine, for the first time, the evolution of the partial pressure of atmospheric dinitrogen. Paleo-atmospheric data gathered during the project will be fed in numerical models of Earth's atmospheric and crustal evolution. This will allow to reconstruct how volatile elements have been exchanged between the silicate Earth and the atmosphere through time. Results gathered during project ATTRACTE will ultimately provide new datasets for climate studies of the ancient Earth but will also help building the scientific framework required to interpret future observations of exoplanetary atmospheres and to portray the geology of extrasolar planets.

Mots-clés : noble gases
Projet ERC : RECONCILE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, 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 : 1322000.0 €

As climate changes, weather becomes more severe. This has been of long-standing concern, and difficulties arise in connecting the two different ranges of scales involved. Hail, rainshowers and strong winds result from the local dynamics of cloud updrafts, while the general circulation determines the relative occurrence of convective regimes to maintain energy balance. Historically, limitations in computing power mostly led to separate analyses of cloud dynamics and the large-scale circulation. The mesoscales, in-between, host a rich ecosystem of weather features, organized in a diversity of shapes and morphologies but overly simplified in traditional climate models. This scale separation leads to large uncertainties in the projection of future extremes: the dynamic adjustment of weather systems to the large-scale flow is unconstrained, and small-scale perturbations may feed back onto the global climate state.  RECONCILE revisits how the multi-scale character of extreme precipitation emerges from the interaction between storms and the large-scale circulation. It introduces a novel approach by focusing on the dynamics of storm populations rather than individual storm objects. This paradigm of populations is borrowed from ecology and scarcely used in climate physics. It allows to overcome strong biases present in operational climate models, by allowing for a diversity in the represented cloud structures and an explicit two-way interaction across the continuum of scales.  The current emergence of global storm-resolving models is an unprecendented opportunity to investigate this dynamic coherence across multiple scales of motion. RECONCILE proposes a way forward, at the intersection of two WCRP's grand challenges: Weather and Climate Extremes, and Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity, with strong implications for climate model evaluation.

Mots-clés : precipitation extremes,convection,mesoscale convective systems,organization,scale interaction,radiative convective equilibrium
Projet ERC : DYNAMICAUS (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Helmholtz Zentrum München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HMGU
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1045695.0 €

Tackling critical global challenges – climate change, personalized healthcare, or pandemic preparedness – demands robust quantification and understanding of 'if-then' relationships in complex spatio-temporal systems. Traditional dynamical models are limited by oversimplifications and computational constraints, while powerful hybrid models leveraging machine learning (ML) lack the interpretability and generalization capabilities essential for entrusting them with policy guidance. Filling this glaring research gap, DYNAMICAUS develops novel methods for reliable causal inference in such systems, overcoming existing limitations. I will establish a theoretical foundation for causal effects in hybrid dynamical models, develop robust uncertainty quantification techniques under unseen interventions augmented by active data acquisition to reduce uncertainty, and quantify the overall impact of steerable inputs on target outcomes. My methods will be validated across critical domains – climate modeling, treatment planning, and epidemic simulations – demonstrating universal applicability and profound potential for informing policy on pressing societal challenges. By integrating an ethicist directly into the research process from the outset, I proactively address societal implications, ensuring my methodological advancements are positioned to achieve positive social impact. With my unparalleled track record of leveraging machine learning expertise for social good by pushing the boundaries in scientific applications as well as my pioneering work on extending the scope of causal inference and hybrid dynamical systems modeling, this timely project is uniquely positioned to break new ground at the intersection of dynamical systems, causality, and socially beneficial machine learning.

Mots-clés : hybrid dynamical models,uncertainty,cause effect quantification,socially beneficial machine learning
Projet ERC : InterGen (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université libre d'Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1663193.0 €

Poor educational achievement in childhood is a major risk factor for poor health and low income in adulthood. Poor educational outcomes tend to run in families, generating a cycle of inequality. Children whose parents talk and read less to them, tend to struggle in school. This parent-child association has been interpreted as a causal effect of parenting, but parents provide their children not only with a rearing environment, but also genes. We can only discover causal effects of the home learning environment (e.g., parent-child interactions, reading storybooks) if we control for genetics or run an RCT. My overarching aim is to discover which aspects of the home learning environment causally impact children’s language, reading, and math development. INTERGEN will use a variety of innovative observational and experimental designs. We will employ existing rich datasets and collect novel data to triangulate four intergenerational (i.e., parent-child) designs. Using an online-learning platform, we will assess parent and child literacy and numeracy in 3000 twin families. In an RCT, 2000 of these families will get access to the online-learning platform to boost the home learning environment. INTERGEN will: 1. Include gene-environment interplay in studying children’s motivation, literacy and numeracy development 2. Discover which features of the home learning environment have a causal impact on learning 3. Test the effectiveness of offering families an online-learning platform to practice literacy and numeracy  My training and established network in both education and genetics, combined with recent breakthroughs in statistical modelling, gene-finding work, and educational technology, make me uniquely suited to lead this timely project. INTERGEN has the ground-breaking opportunity to unravel the mechanisms underlying familial educational disadvantage. This will inform policy on how to target malleable causal mechanisms to ensure that all children can learn and thrive.

Mots-clés : educational behavioural genetics twin studies on reading ability gene environment interplay children of twins model
Projet ERC : SIESTA (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, 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 : 2089972.0 €

Dramatic shifts in Earth’s climate and geography have profoundly influenced biological innovation and biogeochemical cycles. Despite widespread and extreme environmental change including global glaciations lasting millions of years, microbial life has thrived: accruing distinct phylogenies, morphologies, physiologies, and functions over geological time. Microorganisms use dormancy as a survival strategy to persist throughout unfavorable changes in their environment. Dormant organisms withdraw from the present environment and become part of a seed-bank, investing instead in contributing to the diversity and function of future ecosystems. This leads to the rousing proposition that a shift in the active/dormant fraction of a microbial population may profoundly affect ecological functioning and elemental cycling. Despite this intriguing connection, we lack fundamental knowledge on the prevalence, triggers and timescales of dormancy, and how these factors affect ecosystems and elemental budgets. I will address this by elucidating the role of microbial dormancy as an ecological and biogeochemical regulator on Earth. The cryosphere provides a unique testing ground to meet my goals. Here, microbes contend with dramatic variations in environmental extremes on timescales ranging from days to thousands of years. Through an innovative data-driven approach involving experiments and modelling, I will: 1) quantify the prevalence of dormancy among taxonomically and functionally diverse microbial communities, 2) identify the triggers and timescales of dormancy, 3) link dormancy to the emergence, survival and evolution of microbial populations and 4) elucidate the role of dormancy as a regulator of biogeochemical cycles. Understanding the interplay between microbial dormancy, ecological processes and biogeochemical cycles holds the key to understanding the co-evolution of life and our planet, and how life excels throughout glacial-interglacial cycles and other global changes.

Mots-clés : geobiology,biogeochemical cycles,environmental microbiology
Projet ERC : MINIONS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : National Center for Oncological Hadrontherapy — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CNAO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 106312.5 €

External-beam radiotherapy has been established as best practice care in different cancer cases, although current models applied in the clinics to tune the treatment plan dosimetry, as a function of the expected tumour response and radiation-induced toxicity, do not make use of patient-specific information, but rely on radiobiological parameters typically derived from in-vitro experiments, thus abdicating from describing the in-vivo complexity of the pathology. MINIONS is a cutting-edge research programme that investigates and integrates a set of activities to implement patient-specific microstructural and radiobiological models in personalized radiotherapy treatment planning and adaptation towards a detailed description of tumour characteristics of each patient and thus significantly improved tumour control probability. The main challenge of MINIONS is to create, for the first time, a real-time patient-specific model able to describe the microscopic characteristic of the tumour and its interaction with the radiation beam. The scientific activities of MINIONS are to achieve and merge: (i) Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations of Diffusion Magnetic Resonance (DW-MR) signals and radiation-tissue interactions on a library of in-silico cellular substrates to obtain an integrated simulation platform; (ii) real-time Artificial Intelligence-based techniques to accelerate MC simulations and make them compatible with fast treatment planning and adaptation; (ii) advanced DW-MR imaging, to retrieve non-invasively the information required to feed the simulation platform for the implementation of patient-specific microstructural and radiobiological models. The design of in-vivo and ex-vivo tests allows validating the model performance and the collaboration of researchers, engineers and clinicians will drive the use of this innovative strategy in clinical routine, to increase survival and quality of life for a wide range of cancer patients.

Mots-clés : personalised radiotherapy,microstructural and radiobilogical modelling in radiotherapy,diffusion mri in radiotherapy,monte carlo simulations in radiotherapy,artificial intelligence in radiotherapy
Projet ERC : EchoLux (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Helmholtz Zentrum München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HMGU
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499976.0 €

Radiomics - the extraction of clinically relevant information from complex medical imaging data via mathematics and data science - is on the verge of becoming a main player in clinical research and medicine. However, the current radiomics workflow mostly relies on feature engineering and black box machine learning, lagging behind the state-of-the-art in explainable artificial intelligence. I will exploit my broad expertise in mathematics, informatics, and biomedical imaging to implement intelligent radiomics by integrating the whole imaging value chain - ranging from imaging hardware, over image formation, to medical interpretation of the data - into an intelligent software environment. EchoLux is a paradigm shift from black box machine learning to truly intelligent radiomics. EchoLux will be realized in three steps: 1) Modelling the imaging system via a digital twin approach using dedicated physical phantom data and a reference dataset acquired from healthy volunteers; 2) Development and integration of a medical knowledge base that captures the effects of disease on the imaged tissue; 3) Integration of system and medical tissue models into a Bayesian reasoning framework that is able to perform explainable diagnostics and medical knowledge discovery. The clinical use case is optoacoustic imaging of peripheral neuropathy. I recently demonstrated that the internal structure and vascular supply of peripheral nerves can be visualized in unprecedented detail by exploiting the molecular contrast of optoacoustic imaging. The EchoLux approach, thus, has the potential to enable early detection of pathological changes in peripheral nerves, e.g., in conjunction with diabetes. EchoLux links the clinical imaging data simultaneously back to the hardware and forward to the medical decision making. This holistic and interdisciplinary approach will leverage radiomics in general and boost the clinical value of optoacoustic imaging.

Mots-clés : optoacoustic imaging,photoacoustic imaging,radiomics,neuropathy
Projet ERC : RECONPAX (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Leyde — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496675.0 €

How did peace movements act upon the interlinked processes of decolonization and the Cold War? And how did these processes, in turn, impact the ability of peace movements to come together in large international organizations for peace? RECONPAX studies attempts to build large international coalitions for peace in the period 1918-1970. It departs from the assumption that, while peace activists reached out to each other in pursuit of shared goals, they did not necessarily share common methods. Attempts to include organizations from the decolonizing world in existing international bodies brought different understandings of peace work to the surface. In short, the necessary preconditions for a peaceful international order were both locally and historically contingent.  This project brings historical depth to an issue of continuing relevance to the international order. It challenges the historiographical focus on the Cold War as the primary factor in the development of international peace organizations. It does so in two ways: by taking a longue durée perspective that incorporates precedents set by peace movements after the First World War; and by turning the lens on decolonization rather than on superpower competition. RECONPAX hypothesizes that the challenges posed by decolonization and the end of empire were the dominant drivers of success and failure in building international coalitions for peace. A four-person team consisting of two PhD researchers, a Postdoc and the PI will study these dynamics from four different, complementary vantage points, all divisive issues in the peace organizations of the postwar decades: conscientious objection to military service in the decolonizing world (PhD1), non-proliferation in the decolonizing world (PhD2), peace in maternalist thought (Postdoc), and peace in anti-imperialist thought (PI). Together, they will reveal how these issues shaped the possibilities and constraints of international coalition building.

Mots-clés : internationalism,peace movements,afro asianism,decolonization