Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MOSAIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Twente — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Our surface and drinking water sources are increasingly threatened by the presence of organic micropollutants (OMPs). OMPs are small molecules (100-1000 Da) that originate from industrial, agricultural and pharmaceutical residues, and can cause long-term harm to humans and ecosystems. While OMPs can be removed from water with existing membrane technologies (e.g., reverse osmosis), these methods have significant limitations: they are energy-intensive and lead to problematic brine waste streams, due to their low water and salt permeability.  In this project I aim to solve these limitations by building charge-mosaic membranes; membranes with small (nm2) oppositely charged patches that allow coupled passage of negative and positive ions. This design, aimed at reducing salt retention, was conceived over 90 years ago, but was never realized in a scalable manner due to its challenging design. Here, I propose a simple and fully scalable approach to achieve such membranes, using polyelectrolyte multilayers (PEMs) of oppositely charged polymers. I will build these charge-mosaic membranes using ultrathin, ultradense layers in an asymmetric PEM approach to achieve a very high (> 99%) retention of OMPs and a high water permeability.  Combined with state-of-the-art modelling, this project will also provide new fundamental insights into membrane mass transport. Moreover, the project will directly lead to membranes with unique separation properties, allowing the design of completely new processes to effectively remove OMPs from waste water and drinking water. ter.

Mots-clés : polyelectrolyte multilayers,nanofiltration,contaminants of emerging concern,membrane surface science
Projet ERC : NONLINEARSCIENCE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Tilbourg — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999555.0 €

Nonlinearity is ubiquitous in the social sciences. In cross-sectional research, nonlinearity naturally follows from the fact that variables often depend on human perception. The tendency to share fake news, for example, depends in a complex nonlinear manner on peoples’ personality and political preferences. In longitudinal research, nonlinearity follows from the fact that temporal social processes are nonstationary by nature. For instance, stressful life events (e.g., unemployment, pandemic) have a complex nonlinear impact on well-being over time. To study these nonlinear phenomena, much more data are needed than in linear analyses. Therefore, researchers increasingly rely on technological innovations to collect rich data, such as panel data via online surveys, experience sampling data via mobile apps, or temporal social network data using digital communication (e.g., email). In addition, prior information (e.g., from experts) is often available to inform us about plausible nonlinear shapes. A crucial problem is however that statistical approaches for learning nonlinearity still heavily rely on old-fashioned techniques which can only model simple (curvilinear) effects and are unable to include external prior information. Our understanding about nonlinear phenomena therefore remains limited. This project aims to resolve these shortcomings by developing cutting-edge methods for nonlinear social science using Bayesian Gaussian processes. With this nonparametric methodology, we can learn complex nonlinear shapes, add prior knowledge, and test nonlinear theories. Implementation in user-friendly software will ensure general utilization. Tailor-made extensions will be developed for cross-sectional data, panel data, experience sampling data, and temporal social network data. After this project, we will be able to truly understand complex nonlinear mechanisms, to learn how these unfold over time, and to make accurate predictions (e.g., of well-being after life events).

Mots-clés : bayesian statistics nonlinear social science life course sociology organizational sociology
Projet ERC : EXPAT (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKSH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 818481.25 €

Our behaviours and conscious experiences are profoundly shaped by what we see. Therefore, it is not surprising that unravelling the neural mechanisms of vision ranks among the top priorities of neuroscience. This poses the challenge of unravelling how our brain creates seamless and comprehensible visual experiences from the dizzying onslaught of visual information bombarding our retinae. Previous research suggests that expectation and attention play a central role in coordinating this information extraction process. However, at present, deep insights into how these two top-down processes shape information processing in the human visual system remain elusive. EXPAT will address this outstanding knowledge gap by revealing how expectation and attention change natural image information encoding in the human brain across visual features, across brain areas and across time. To this end, EXPAT sets itself the following three objectives: 1) revealing how expectation and attention change the specificity and efficiency of information encoding in the human visual cortex, 2) measuring the impact of expectation and attention on image information encoding across cortical brain areas and between-area information transfer and 3) obtaining insights into how expectation and attention change the chronology of visual information processing. Moreover, EXPAT will address the open question of whether or not attention and expectation effects in the visual cortex are mediated by the same or by different feedback mechanisms. These objectives will be realised by using several advanced methods, including various multivariate analyses of fMRI and EEG data, a deep convolutional network-based approach for creating ‘feature-reduced’ natural images, a multivariate brain connectivity measure and a psychophysical technique for measuring the informativeness of image features.
Projet ERC : VESICULOME (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKSH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999423.0 €

Bacterial extracellular vesicles (BEVs) are small membrane vesicles secreted by a diverse range of bacteria that act as bioactive nanocarriers of a high diversity of proteins, lipids and nucleic acids. BEVs have mostly been studied in pathogenic bacterial models, owing to their causal role in pathogenicity. Compared to other microbial features, such as taxa, genes or metabolites, BEVs secreted by the large diversity of commensal bacterial species of the human gut microbiota have received little attention so far, leaving their influence upon gut microbial ecology and human health almost entirely unknown. We hypothesize that gut BEVs and their molecular cargos (i.e. the gut bacterial vesiculome) play critical roles in bacteria-bacteria and host-microbiome interactions, and in shaping phenotypes of host-microbiome systems. Our project will enable a comprehensive profiling of BEV molecular diversity across a large number of gut bacterial taxa, and a functional analysis of their impact on inter-species and inter-kingdom interactions. We intend to tackle these objectives through three aims: 1) characterize the origin, diversity and evolution of the human gut bacterial vesiculome; 2) investigate the role of BEVs in promoting horizontal gene transfers among bacterial species in the gut microbiome; and 3) investigate the role of BEVs on bacteria-bacteria and host-bacteria interactions. We will tackle each of these aims from three diversity perspectives: investigating multiple bacterial species, including geographically-distinct healthy human populations, and comparing healthy vs. disease. The project will expand our basic understanding of the evolution and function of bacterial vesiculation. It will also generate the first atlas of BEV profiles across gut bacterial taxa and host cohorts, providing key resources to mine for vesicular characteristics and functions that have translational potential for biomedicine.
Projet ERC : WINDFLOW (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Twente — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Turbulence drives transport processes in the atmosphere and determines Earth’s weather and climate. Wind farm performance depends on atmospheric turbulence as it entrains energy into wind turbine arrays. As wind turbines and farms expand in size, they increasingly interact with an unexplored atmospheric region and large-scale weather phenomena in ways that are not fully understood. Typical wind farm simulations assume idealized cases and do not capture the influence of (i) dynamic changes in atmospheric conditions, (ii) the interaction between the atmosphere and ocean, and (iii) the influence of clouds. In reality, these effects are dynamic and influence atmospheric turbulent flow across a wind farm. Understanding these interactions is crucial to optimize wind farm design, control, and power production forecasts. Far beyond the local scale, wind farm physics impact large-scale atmospheric processes. Outstanding questions include how wind farms influence large-scale weather phenomena, atmospheric stability, moisture dispersion, and clouds. The influence of wind farms on heat and momentum exchange between the atmosphere and ocean is also not fully understood.  To bridge these knowledge gaps, I envision using 3D simulations to locally model the wind farm flow physics (microscale) in a weather model (mesoscale). This is a conceptually different approach from typical weather models that use a limited refinement of microscale processes throughout the domain. Using high-resolution simulations, I will go beyond idealized cases and explore dynamic interaction between atmosphere, ocean, clouds, and wind farms. The goal is to study wind farm interaction with realistic weather conditions and provide more accurate wind production forecasts. I will develop novel computational techniques to increase the domain size of high-resolution simulations. Addressing these fundamental modeling challenges is crucial to unlock the complex interaction between wind farms and the atmosphere.

Mots-clés : turbulence,fluid dynamics,fluid mechanics,wind farm fluid mechanics
Projet ERC : AviArch (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1683380.25 €

We love birds but probably do not worry enough about our relationship to them. Across the world, we are threatening their critical ecosystem functions, including birds’ positive impact on our wellbeing, and poultry has become our favourite meat, yet industrial-scale breeding has consequences for human and bird health. Arguably, this lack of concern is due to our ignorance of the deep historical roots of these relationships. Our interaction with birds, for their plumage, eggs, meat, song, or spirit, extends back to prehistory. At the same time, avifauna responded to climate shifts, and to our modifications of the landscape. This has created a tangled archaeological record, which makes understanding bird-human relationships all but impossible. Building upon and moving beyond my expertise in biomolecular archaeology, AviArch will explore, from a bird’s eye view, the transition to agriculture in Epipalaeolithic/Neolithic southwest Asia and the emergence of urban life and trade routes in Bronze Age Crete. AviArch will reveal the variety of birds in past human systems by using new techniques for the identification of avifauna, integrating zooarchaeology, palaeoproteomics and AI. My sites have been carefully chosen to target biodiversity hotspots with a rich archaeological record intersecting socio-ecological changes of human-bird relationships. We will combine ecological, morphological, and behavioural traits for each bird, to produce the most refined exploration of human-avian relationships yet attempted in archaeology. Using network analysis and underpinned by multispecies theory, AviArch’s archaeoecological models will discover how environmental shifts affected people, and anthropogenic- and climate-driven changes affected birds.  By transforming the ways in which past bird-human interactions are studied, AviArch promises to improve human adaptivity, avian conservation strategies, and make us worry and marvel about these beautiful creatures a little more.

Mots-clés : zooarchaeology avifauna archaeological methods human environment interactions palaeoproteomics artificial intelligence networks
Projet ERC : CompleX (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université de Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1062162.5 €

Silicon sensors have been extensively exploited in high-energy physics experiments in the past 40 years, from their first use in NA11 at the SPS (CERN) to their application in the present-day design of very large particle trackers. The capability of silicon sensors to work in environments with high radiation levels has been of utmost importance for experiments at accelerating machines with very energetic and intense particle beams. Presently available silicon sensors can operate efficiently up to particle fluences of 2E16/cm2, while future frontier accelerators envisage the use of silicon sensors in environments with fluences exceeding 5E17/cm2. If not overcome, this gap will prevent the use of silicon sensors in future hadron-collider experiments.  CompleX aims at extending the range of operation of silicon detectors by more than one order of magnitude, up to a fluence of 5E17/cm2. The idea behind this unprecedented target in radiation tolerance relies on a novel understanding of the saturation of the radiation damage and on the advantages that compensated implants bring to radiation hardness. The application of these two breakthroughs to thin silicon sensors (20–40 microns) with an internal gain of 10–20 will allow the design of sensors able to operate up to the target fluence.  I am the PI of three projects to develop silicon sensors for extreme fluences (eXFlu – INFN, eXFlu-innova – AIDAinnova, FLEX – UNITO), which represent preparatory developments for the CompleX proposal. In this context, I introduced the principle of doping compensation in silicon sensors to the detector community. My expertise in the design and testing of silicon sensors, my involvement in radiation hardness studies, and my experience in project coordination qualify me as a recognised expert in the development of sensors for extreme fluences and enable me, as PI, to target the CompleX goals.

Mots-clés : particle tracking,silicon sensors,extreme fluences,lgad
Projet ERC : ClimateBanking (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université Johann Wolfgang Goethe de Francfort-sur-le-Main — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1841342.5 €

Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our generation, affecting every country, every firm, and every person on this planet for decades to come. More than half of carbon emissions arise from bank-dependent sectors of the economy; and a large part of renewable energy production is financed by banks. The banking sector plays a crucial role for lending to firms and households, for the issuance of securities, for project financing, and for mergers and acquisitions. Yet, the role of banks in addressing climate change is not yet well understood. The goal of this project is to provide a fundamental understanding of the role of the banking sector in addressing climate change. The project will take a holistic view and analyze several channels through which the banking sector plays a central role in addressing climate change: the role of laws and regulations, the role of governance mechanisms in the banking sector, the role of state-owned banks, as well as the interaction between public markets and banks. I pursue this research agenda in two parts. The first part focuses on the role of the banking industry for firms, while the second part focuses on the role of the banking industry for households. Both parts will analyze key agency and financial constraints that can impede the provision of financing for long-term investments that are at the heart of climate finance. This project will shape our understanding of the role of the banking sector in addressing climate change. It will empirically analyze key channels, advance the methodological toolkit that can serve as the basis for future research in this area, and create unparalleled new data sets tailored to analyzing the role of the banking sector in addressing climate change. The results of this project can help academics, regulators, policymakers, and society to understand and address one of the key challenges of our times.

Mots-clés : financial intermediation,climate change,lending,deposits,bank regulation
Projet ERC : HSC-reNEW (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Istituti di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IRCCS
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Although hematopoietic stem cell (HSCs) transplantation is routinely used to treat blood disorders, immune incompatibility and donor shortage remain critical clinical barriers. Likewise, since high number of HSCs are needed for successful transplants, the absence of reliable expansion protocols prevents the wider application of this cell therapy. In fact, while HSC-based gene therapy represents a revolutionary treatment also for novel and unexpected indications, the ex vivo manipulation required for HSCs engineering results in loss of their stemness potential. Patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) could serve as a solution to these problems, as they would provide a potentially unlimited, easy to engineer, source of immunologically matched HSCs. However, despite recent advances, the robust de novo generation of HSCs remains unrealized due to an incomplete understanding of how HSCs are generated during embryonic development, a process that, as such, cannot be accurately recapitulated in vitro. To tackle these issues, in this proposal we will leverage on our proven expertise in PSC differentiation and hematopoietic development. In particular, we will use innovative in vitro assays and systematic measurements to determine at the molecular level how HSC precursors control their gene expression to generate blood cells (Aim 1). Combining the study of the highly proliferative emerging embryonic HSCs with a CRISPR-based gain-of-function screen, we will uncover the molecular regulators of the extensive embryonic self-renewal, thus enabling robust specification of HSCs from PSCs (Aim 2). We will design strategies to resurrect this embryonic self-renewal program in postnatal HSCs for their in vitro expansion (Aim 3). The successful completion of these studies will accomplish the long-standing goals of generating and expanding HSCs in vitro, allowing the fully exploitation of the transformative therapeutic potential of HSC-based cell and gene therapies.

Mots-clés : hematopoietic stem cells hscs,hsc expansion,pluripotent stem cells,hematopoietic development,hemogenic endothelium,endothelial to hematopoietic transition
Projet ERC : DIVERSE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université Pompeu Fabra — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2133101.0 €

Does the digital divide deprive movements for environmental justice (EJ) and in defence of biocultural diversity from the benefits of digitalisation? DIVERSE’s hypotheses resist the idea. From drone monitoring of forests to indigenous digital media and online mapping to vindicate stories of resistance and transformation, a digital transformation from the ground up may not only be paving the way for just and diverse futures but also for an alternative understanding of digitalisation. Yet no large-scale scientific study has examined the occurrence of digitalisation in grassroots transformative initiatives (GTI) nor theorised its effects. While elite-and growth-driven digital innovations are redefining lifestyles and overall imaginaries of the future, a strong debate in the fields of political ecology and EJ involves two confronted views (celebratory vs technophobic) on the likelihood of enfranchising technologies. DIVERSE’s overarching goal is to theorise an alternative model of digital transformation rooted in relationality (care, community, personal connection) that emerges from GTI in their pursuit of diverse worlds and EJ. The ground-breaking approach combines qualitative data (from expert interviews and databases compilation worldwide, to case-studies and biographical interviews across continents) with quantitative methods and models to analyse these data (e.g., two newly created indices, transformative effectiveness and GTI digitalisation, and a first global compilation of digital practices in GTI), offering both an understanding of causal chains and a basis for generalisation. DIVERSE proposes the new concepts of “life-centred digitalisation” including both livelihoods and ecology, and “situated digital leadership”, disclosing the specific links of digitalisation with changes in material experiences, situated knowledge and place-based digital ecologies. My ultimate goal in terms of theory is to lay out the foundations of a political ecology of digitalisation.

Mots-clés : environmental justice biocultural diversity grassroots transformative initiatives digital transformations relationality life centred digitalisation situated digital leadership digital divide