Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CARBONWEB (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Leibniz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WLG
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1861949.5 €

Soil food webs process 90% of the terrestrial primary production and regulate the second largest carbon pool on Earth – soil organic matter. Soil food webs themselves are regulated by soil animals through changes in microbial functioning, detritus quality, and physical soil structure. However, neither drivers of soil food web structure and functions nor their effects on global biogeochemistry and carbon stabilisation are quantified across large environmental gradients. CARBONWEB addresses this challenge at the global scale and tests the following Key Hypotheses: (A) biotic controls of soil food web structure and functions increase under conditions promoting biological activity and nutrient limitation; (B) consumption of detritus by consumers in soil food webs increases the stable fraction of soil carbon across ecosystem types; (C) the effect of soil animals on multiple ecosystem functions increases with temperature, precipitation, and nutrient limitation, proportionally to the total energy flux in soil food webs; (D) the global net effect of soil animals on topsoil carbon is positive (>10% increase) and will increase with climate warming. To test my hypotheses, I will use (1) the first comprehensive global monitoring of soil animal communities in the framework of Soil BON, (2) an EU-wide survey and isotopic experiments on carbon stabilisation, (3) steady-state and dynamic food web modelling and AI-based animal image analysis approaches, and (4) geospatial extrapolations. My experience in soil macroecology, functional ecology, large-scale project coordination, and the established collaborative network will help to ensure this project is successful. I will describe and mechanistically model the status and trends of energy fluxes, animal biodiversity, and carbon pools in global topsoils. Results of the project will provide the first-ever global estimation of soil food web effects on soil functioning and facilitate long-term monitoring of soil biodiversity.

Mots-clés : food webs,soil biodiversity,energy flux,stable isotope,macroecology,decomposition,carbon sequestration
Projet ERC : HEAT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1983000.0 €

Half a million people die due to heat stress every year. These numbers keep rising as climate continues to change. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, and disproportionally synchronised with droughts. Droughts reduce the ability of the land surface to cool down via evaporation, further enhancing heatwave temperatures. Nonetheless, how these compound drought–heatwave events spatially propagate, and their future lethality, remains unclear. Counterintuitive findings now indicate that drought can even dampen heatwave deadliness by reducing air humidity.  Consequently, our ability to forecast dry–hot events and their impacts on human health remains limited. Subseasonal timescales, between two weeks and two months, have traditionally been a blind spot: conventional weather forecast models are not tailored to these scales. However, the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may hold the key to fill this gap and reliably predict the upcoming occurrence of heat stress episodes weeks in advance. This would bring enormous societal benefits by enabling emergency planning. In this project, we will explore an innovative way to generate subseasonal forecasts of droughts and heatwaves, and their consequent human heat stress episodes. A 'hybrid' approach will be embraced, i.e., an approach based on physics-based models combined with AI algorithms. Building upon this approach, we will deepen our understanding of the climatic drivers of human heat stress, and explore the future benefits of land-based adaptation practices designed to attenuate these events, including afforestation, crop selection, and large-scale irrigation. Altogether, HEAT will foster our preparedness and resilience to future heat stress episodes – by improving their prediction, investigating the mechanisms that trigger them globally, and providing realistic and effective land-adaptation strategies to mitigate them – while heralding the adoption of hybrid approaches in climate science.

Mots-clés : drought,heatwave,hybrid,forecast,artificial intelligence,land management,adaptation,feedback
Projet ERC : IMPACTUM (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1981250.0 €

Urgent Measures (UMs) are granted by international human rights (HRs) bodies to protect persons in a situation of extreme gravity/urgency. In Latin America, UMs are mostly granted to protect detainees, when their right to life, integrity and/or health are in danger of being violated. When a UM is granted, the state is requested to provide detainees with e.g. immediate access to medical care, drinking water, or sanitation. In such cases, UMs may prompt emergency protective actions that can, in the most extreme circumstances, save the life of the beneficiary of these measures. Though UMs have been issued on thousands of occasions, they have attracted little academic attention. The few studies that exist focus on a doctrinal analysis on compliance. Such studies have several shortcomings in that they primarily examine only procedural legal aspects, and often excessively rely on information provided by HRs bodies themselves. As UMs often face practical, financial and political constraints that shape and limit their implementation, it is crucial to establish a better understanding of how these measures are applied in practice. IMPACTUM moves beyond the traditional legal research questions and methods of analysing UMs. It instead proposes an interdisciplinary study of UMs that: 1) considers the context in which UMs are enforced and how they are applied on the ground; 2) assesses the impacts of UMs on detainees, legal/institutional systems and (inter)national actors; 3) discusses their strengths/limitations; 4) analyses their wider learning effects. With reference to UMs granted by 4 HRs bodies to protect at-risk detainees in 6 Latin American countries, IMPACTUM will develop a critical normative impact framework useful to provide a deeper theoretical analysis, as well as insight into how to formulate UMs to maximise their practical protective effects. IMPACTUM will thus uncover and present new knowledge on emerging issues with UMs that are currently unaddressed in academia.

Mots-clés : urgent measures,international human rights systems,persons deprived of liberty,impact
Projet ERC : FINISTERRA (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de l'Algarve — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UALG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1899696.0 €

In recent years, knowledge of the processes involved in the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the successful expansion of our species across Eurasia has substantially increased. Still, the spatiotemporal variability of the presumed mechanisms behind Neanderthals’ demise – climate change, fragile demography, inter-species competition – makes it very challenging to evaluate the replacement at a continental scale. The Iberian Peninsula, due to its cul-de-sac position and the role of its southern regions as one of the last refugia for the Neanderthals, represents an ideal natural setting for testing models of cultural and demographic trajectories leading to the final disappearance of those populations. FINISTERRA seeks to expand this framework by implementing an integrative, interdisciplinary, multi-scale approach to the archaeological and paleoenvironmental records associated with late Neanderthals in southwestern Iberia. Supported by an unprecedented combination of geoarchaeological, chronological, and paleoecological evidence, FINISTERRA will specifically (1) provide a detailed characterization of late Neanderthal adaptive systems, presenting high-resolution data on the timeline of events leading to their final disappearance; (2) investigate the presence of the so-called early warning signals of Neanderthals’ collapse through the use of cutting-edge quantitative analyses of cultural and demographic trajectories; (3) explore alternative hypotheses of a gradual or sudden loss of Neanderthals’ resilience by considering the impacts of climate change and the spread of modern humans into western Eurasia. The results of this project will have crucial implications for our understanding of the factors contributing to the demise of our sister species, which ultimately were key components for our own success and uniqueness.

Mots-clés : neanderthals,middle paleolithic,eco cultural dynamics,iberia
Projet ERC : INTEMPO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université nationale d'Irlande à Maynooth — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999698.0 €

Deploying a complex methodological apparatus drawing on transnational history, this project breaks new ground by providing an original global history of fascism (1919-1945). INTEMPO argues that the fascist national revolutions were part of a global project of overhauling the liberal international order and replacing it with a fascist one. It does so by approaching transnational fascism through the lens of temporality, showing the centrality of a specific temporal structure to fascist ideology. Fascists everywhere repurposed a historical or mythical past, saw their present as a watershed moment in world history, and aimed to accelerate it toward a redemptive future of eternal plenitude when time would stand still. Despite significant variation related to the different national contexts in which fascist movements and regimes emerged, the compatibility of this temporal structure – translating spatially into distinct but similarly compatible projections of a ‘New Order’ – allowed mutual recognition and enabled international cooperation that transcended fascism’s ultra-nationalism. The project further shows how fascism’s temporal imagination resolutely opposed the universal time regime associated with the spread of capitalism, liberalism, and colonial expansion. Fascist temporalities and their revolutionary potential are consequently used as an entry point for elucidating fascism’s restructuring of space – social space internally and geopolitical space internationally – and its complex engagement with capitalism and colonialism, respectively. The focus on temporality, underpinning analysis of the diverse forms that interactions between fascist movements and regimes took, allows us to operate across different spatial scales of analysis, from the local through the national to the global. INTEMPO inaugurates a new research agenda in four distinct fields: fascism studies, global history, the history of empire and colonialism, and the interdisciplinary study of temporality.

Mots-clés : fascism,temporality,global history,colonialism,conceptual history,corporatism,violence,genocide
Projet ERC : RESTORE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RCSI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2039473.0 €

Osteoporotic vertebral fractures (OVFs) are the most common complication of osteoporosis. Current treatment involves conventional procedures that inject cement into the vertebrae to stabilise the spine and relieve pain. No reparative treatment exists. Biomaterial-based treatments have had very limited success due to a number of complex challenges, such as providing dual therapeutic and mechanical functionalities to meet clinical requirements. Building on a wealth of experience in the area of materials processes, we propose the solution. RESTORE will initially overcome the problems with traditional biomaterials approaches by utilising recent advances in the area of advanced manufacturing and 3D-printing to engineer a dual component biomaterial platform, comprising of a 3D-printed biodegradable stent and a thermoresponsive hydrogel, with mechanical properties and bioactive composition tailored to regenerate and repair osteoporotic vertebral bone. Following this, and consolidating the research in the applicant’s lab on biomaterial-mediated delivery of therapeutics to enhance bone formation and inhibit resorption, the hydrogel component will be functionalised for the controlled delivery of antioxidant lanthanides, to combat increased oxidative stress in the osteoporotic bone microenvironment, and modulate impaired bone remodelling to drive bone regeneration and facilitate repair. The RESTORE technology has potential for use in a patient specific personalized medicine format as the 3D-printing process utilised allows for the stents to be tailored to the patient’s individual vertebra. The hydrogel’s therapeutic load can also be adjusted and offers a potential minimally invasive prophylactic treatment for adjacent diseased vertebrae that do not yet require stenting - a first-of-its-kind prevention strategy for OVFs. The proposed RESTORE platform is thus a paradigm shifting disruptive technology that will revolutionise the way damaged osteoporotic vertebrae are treated.

Mots-clés : osteoporosis,vertebral bone repair,therapeutic biomaterials,bone remodelling,bone regeneration,3d printing,thermoresponsive hydrogels
Projet ERC : FUN-HSC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Fundación Josep Carreras Contra la Leucemia — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2065784.0 €

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) provide a lifelong supply of blood and immune cells. They are a life-saving therapy for leukemia and have recently found broadened applications to gene and cell therapy, against other cancers, genetic, autoimmune, and infectious diseases. Nonetheless, practical limitations, such as donor-matching or insufficient cell number render these therapies unfeasible or unsuccessful for many patients. Attempts to overcome these limitations have been unable to create a reliable source of HSC for patients: while we can generate human HSC from pluripotent stem cells (PSC), they resemble early development stages, lacking the functional maturation hallmarks. FUN-HSC aims at identifying core and actionable maturation pathways for HSCs and at defining the contribution of coordinated gene expression by chromatin regulation, using a combination of functional and genetic screening technologies and high-throughput readouts in vitro and in vivo. HSC maturation occurs in the liver during fetal development and confers functional multilineage hematopoiesis ability throughout adulthood. Using single cell omics analysis of human embryonic and fetal tissues, we describe multiple gene programs changing during developmental HSC maturation. This study will lead to candidate cell-intrinsic and niche-dependent instructions, which will be dissected in the context of the fetal liver, by analyzing the cell compartments and their interactions and by combining novel organoid technologies with mouse xenografts to model the fetal liver environment. Ultimately, we aim to identify a strategy that mimics these pathways in vitro to bring the maturation stage of the PSC-derived HSC, to a robustly engraftable and clinically valuable HSC source. Harnessing new knowledge in human HSC biology, cutting-edge genetics and tissue technologies, FUN-HSC will provide great advances in the mission of making and maintaining HSCs in vitro, enabling their full therapeutic potential.

Mots-clés : single cell,hematopoietic stem cells,hematopoietic stem cell transplantation,crispra,crispri,sgrna screening,fetal liver,stem cell niche,epigenetics
Projet ERC : XenoSim (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999410.0 €

We are at the dawn of a new age in medicine, marked by the first pig-to-human heart transplant. Xenotransplantation has long been a dream for clinicians and now, due to rapid progress in gene editing, is becoming a reality. To overcome immediate rejection, barriers of immunity and infection have to be overcome, however, achieving long-term success requires a deep understanding of the physiological and mechanical challenges introduced by the anatomically dissimilar xenotransplants. XENOSIM aims to address these challenges by providing fundamental clinical insights into the nascent field of cardiac xenotransplantation through the development and application of novel high-resolution, higher-order, multiphysics simulation methods. Tremendous progress has been made in biomedical imaging, nonetheless, a multitude of physical phenomena relevant to xenotransplantation are not available for experimental observation. In silico studies are uniquely placed to provide insights into the haemodynamic disruption caused by replacing a human heart with an anatomically dissimilar one. XENOSIM is targeting the establishment of the first family of porcine cardiac xenotransplant models that can provide clinically significant insights into the haemodynamic compatibility of porcine donor hearts, the impact of surgical approach, and the consequence of pathologies. To provide these novel insights requires new coupled simulation approaches. Accordingly, the second goal of XENOSIM is to create a new class of monolithic finite volume fluid-electro-solid interaction methods, which can provide predictions in clinically relevant timescales through the exploitation of hybrid CPU-GPU systems. XENOSIM will establish the new field of computational cardiac xenotransplantation. Furthermore, the novel numerical methods established by XENOSIM are expected to impact a broad range of fields well beyond the project end.

Mots-clés : finite volume methods fluid solid interaction
Projet ERC : Q-Chip (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Luxembourg Institute of science and technology — Pays : Luxembourg — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LIST
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2998371.0 €

A key question for modern quantum technology is: can isolated demonstrator experiments be united to implement real-world applications?  Theory shows that by connecting quantum memories and processors, e.g., on a chip, surprisingly small systems can immediately achieve a quantum advantage. But the experimental implementation remains a grand challenge. Today, optically active spins in solids (colour centres) already implement quantum communication, computing, and memories – albeit individually. Pioneering efforts (including mine) focused on nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond, but low material availability and difficulties in diamond fabrication hinder quantum chip developments.  This project will realise a Quantum System-on-Chip with colour centres in an industrial semiconductor material: silicon carbide. Like a classical System-on-Chip, it will integrate separated processing and memory units, which are connected via photonic quantum communication lines. My mission goals are a) Entangling a quantum processor with a quantum memory; and b) Quantum processing based on instructions from the memory.  To achieve these ambitious goals, I capitalise on two recent breakthroughs, which I spearheaded. My team developed the first quantum-grade fabrication of silicon carbide – and successfully integrated colour centres into nanophotonic quantum communication lines. Further, we recently investigated a new colour centre (the stacking-fault divacancy), which is the semiconductor twin of the nitrogen-vacancy in diamond. The similarity permits us to build upon established techniques and will ultimately allow demonstrating the long-proposed increased coherence times of nuclear spin qubits in silicon carbide.  The successful project will initiate a transformative change towards reliable, cost-effective, and widely available quantum technologies – with Europe at the forefront of these developments considering that its silicon carbide industry is the global leader with >70% market share.

Mots-clés : quantum technology quantum communication spintronics nanophotonics semiconductor quantum optics
Projet ERC : GENCOERCTRL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

GENCOERCTRL is the first transnational empirical theoretical qualitative study of the gendered phenomenon of conflict-related coercive control. Responding to flourishing multi-interdisciplinary interest in physical and sexual forms of conflict-related violence against women (CRVAW) over the last two decades, it reorients scholarship towards the less observationally evident harm of coercive control. Preliminary evidence shows that in conflict settings, women may experience coercive control in the context of informal armed group governance and through the coercive realities of conflict transition, with transitional justice mechanisms critical to making such harms visible for engagement. ‘Coercive control,’ as an invisible but insidious harm, and ‘coercive control’ as a lens through which to understand women’s experiences of conflict, has received little to no scholarly examination. GENCOERCTRL gets ahead of its pending travel into interdisciplinary fields on conflict violence by establishing the basis for the theoretical and empirical expansion of a new field of study of the gendered phenomenon of coercive control. The central research question addresses the multi-dimensional nature of the coercive realities in which women experience coercive control in conflict and transition: How is coercive control in conflict-affected contexts lived and understood by women for whom it is already co-constitutive of their socially coercive realities? It is addressed across four phases: development of a new feminist phenomenological methodology for studying the lived experience of the gendered phenomenon of conflict-related coercive control; generation of unique empirical phenomenological understanding of coercive control in Colombia, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka; analysis of transitional justice mechanisms in those sites through a coercive control lens; synthesising to develop the first ecological framework for the gendered phenomenon of conflict-related coercive control.

Mots-clés : conflict related violence against women coercive control gender feminist theory