Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : OPENS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999614.0 €

The question of the origin of life has intrigued human beings for centuries. Life appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, but we ignore the process that made it possible. Recent theories propose that primitive Earth was a huge chemical reactor where a high diversity of precursor components progressively turned into primordial metabolic, self-replicating, and membrane-bounded systems. The origin of these components is debated. They could be formed endogenously or exogenously. It is remarkable that life appeared on Earth soon after the arrival of tones of extraterrestrial organic material on its surface by the impact of meteorites and comets and thus, exogenous delivery is considered a decisive step in the origin of life. This idea is supported by the detection of amino acids, nucleobases and sugars in meteorites and comets. It has been proposed that the chemical composition of comets could be inherited from the parental, interstellar molecular cloud core. But what molecules of prebiotic interest can be formed in interstellar space? And which ones could be inherited from the initial conditions of star and planet formation?  OPENS is an interdisciplinary project that will discover what prebiotic molecules are present in the interstellar medium (ISM) and are inherited by Solar-system precursors. Our novel approach integrates astronomical observations, laboratory experiments of ices, quantum chemical computations and theoretical modeling. This project is very timely since it will exploit ultra-sensitive, broadband spectral surveys recently obtained with IRAM 30m and Yebes 40m, and data from ALMA and JVLA large programs and from a JWST ERS project. The detection in the ISM of the prebiotic compounds essential for the emergence of life, will pave the way for future laboratory studies in prebiotic chemistry, and will have important implications for our understanding of how life could originate on our planet and how likely it is to emerge elsewhere in the Universe.

Mots-clés : astrochemistry,prebiotic chemistry,complex networks theory,astrobiology,star formation,jwst
Projet ERC : FIND-TB (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : University Hospital Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999788.0 €

About 50-65% of children suffering from tuberculosis (TB) across all age groups are never detected. This contributes to the 250,000 deaths from TB in children annually, making the disease one of the top ten killers of children under the age of five. To improve TB detection in children and reduce TB-related morbidity and mortality, novel diagnostic tests are urgently needed. The Find-TB project aims to address this urgent need by improving case finding at all levels of care in resource-limited, high TB burden settings through the development and validation of an innovative, digital TB triage tool that provides individualized TB disease risk predictions coupled with clinical recommendations to guide next steps of care. The project will capitalize on digital and scientific innovations that have been successfully applied to the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting with large, existing geographically and demographically representative data sets, my team and I will develop and validate two predictive models using highly innovative data science methods (machine learning and Bayesian techniques). An app for use by health personnel at all levels of the health care system will be developed for the best performing model. To maximize the app’s implementation potential, I will engage key stakeholders to assess preferences, acceptability, and feasibility prior to and throughout app development. Furthermore, I will apply human-centered design principles. We will then evaluate the design-locked digital tool in a real-world triage use case in a prospective, cross-sectional diagnostic accuracy study. A cost-effectiveness analysis of population level impact will round out a dossier that will inform a WHO review. This efficient, effective, and scalable digital tool for TB triage of children in resource-limited settings is expected to improve TB diagnosis on an individual-level and thus TB-related morbidity and mortality and on population-level is likely to improve TB control.

Mots-clés : tuberculosis,diagnostics,digital,global health
Projet ERC : AIMS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Université libre de Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1996096.0 €

Icy moons with subsurface oceans in the outer solar are prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life. Among these bodies, the subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a high astrobiological potential. From south polar fissures in its icy crust, Enceladus expels previously dissolved and suspended subsurface ocean material into space in the form of ice grains and plume gas. Until 2017, before the end of the space mission, mass spectrometers aboard the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft orbiting Saturn sampled and analyzed Enceladus subsurface material during several flybys. The analysis of Cassini’s mass spectrometer data obtained from the plume material suggested a diverse inventory of chemical species of biological interest. With AIMS, I will explore the habitability of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean by simulating the geochemical aqueous synthesis and alteration of chemical species under subsurface geophysical conditions relevant to Enceladus. The proposed simulations will thus track the chemical evolution of species during their ascent through the ocean from the moon’s hydrothermally-active rocky core in order to further constrain interpretations and provide new insights into Cassini data and also provide additional feedback and guidance for future space missions to Enceladus. The AIMS-research would be accomplished with two interrelated but operationally independent experiments: (i) hydrothermal (HT) reactor & (ii) ocean-evolution (OE) reactor, to simulate subsurface geo-chemical and -physical processes in the core, ocean and icy vent. This will advance our understanding of synthesis, degradation, alteration, and evolution of organic, inorganic and also biogenic material before it would incorporate into ice grains or plume gas. The results from AIMS research could be used to further constraint subsurface geophysicochemical models to explore the habitability of Enceladus and also to extrapolate to future missions towards other icy moons.

Mots-clés : icy moons,enceladus,europa,habitability,subsurface ocean,hydrothermal chemistry,space missions,extraterrestrial life,cassini space mission,europa clipper space mission,ice grains,organic compounds,biosignatures
Projet ERC : ADAPT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999000.0 €

Organ-specific immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) have a growing socio-economic impact due to their steadily increasing incidence. At least two aspects are still unclear: what immunological mechanisms restrict these diseases to one or a set of specific organs and what triggers the continuously increasing incidence, particularly in industrialized countries. Increasing exposure to harmful environmental triggers, such as pollution but also Western diet, have been suggested as potential reasons. We propose that when locally active immune cells are perturbed by harmful environmental triggers this leads to organ-specific IMIDs. Naïve CD4+ T cells have so far been considered a quasi-homogenous and inert population excluded from organs. Therefore, their contribution to organ-specific IMIDs has been overlooked. Contrary to this, there is evidence that naïve T cells circulate through organs and diversify into different subpopulations reflecting the organ they patrol. This project aims to reveal whether organ adaptation of naïve T cells in steady state is one of the key mechanisms contributing to the organization of the immune system into districts of competence - i.e., areas of inflammation. We also aim to understand whether organ-specific naïve T cells responding to harmful environmental triggers set the early premise for the development of organ-specific IMIDs. We will study this using a unique portfolio of healthy and diseased human organs in combination with multi-modal single-cell technologies to gain an unprecedented resolution in the analysis of naïve T cells. Next, we will use mouse models and 3D human cocultures to test naïve T cell function and response to environmental triggers. This project will influence the current understanding of how the activity of the immune system is adapted and distributed throughout the body, which will also push the boundary of precision medicine to consider organ-specific naïve T cells when designing future immunotherapies.

Mots-clés : human and mouse immunology,immune related diseases,adaptive immunity,systems immunology
Projet ERC : ACTOR (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Darmstadt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1964000.0 €

Imagine navigating through your kitchen, walking around your table and chairs, reaching the counter, sliding a cup on the countertop, pouring yourself some coffee, and preparing a sandwich. Such an every-day situation requires a sequence of behaviors involving the sophisticated interplay of perception, attention, cognition, planning, and action, all unfolding in an ambiguous and uncertain world. Yet, although past research in the behavioral sciences has revealed many properties of these constituent faculties, the understanding of how humans coordinate these cognitive abilities when carrying out every-day tasks is still rudimentary. The goal of this project is to carry out behavioral experiments and develop computational models to identify and characterize perception, cognition, and action in the wild. Our hypothesis is, that sequential actions involving perceptual uncertainty, action variability, internal and external costs and benefits can be understood and modeled in the unified framework of optimal sequential decision making under uncertainty. To achieve this goal, we integrate ideas and methods from psychophysics, statistical decision theory, active vision, intuitive physics, optimal control under uncertainty, navigation, and inverse reinforcement learning. The proposal is structured in such a way that subsequent work packages consider tasks with increasing naturalness, from classical psychophysical production tasks, visuomtor control, to navigation and sandwich making. We will develop methods that allow recovering subjects’ perceptual uncertainties, beliefs about tasks, their subjective costs and benefits including effort, and action variability. Based on our previous experimental work on visuomotor behavior and theoretical work in modeling such behavior on an individual-by-individual and trial-by-trial basis, we seek to elucidate, how perception, cognition, and action are inseparably intertwined in extended, sequential behavior.
Projet ERC : BRAINAMICS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UKE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 207563.0 €

Spontaneous brain activity, the most expensive metabolic process of the human brain, is highly dynamic and continually evolves over timescales of seconds. Human neuroimaging has made it possible to map dynamic patterns of spontaneous network activity with increasing precision. However, our understanding of the origin, function and organization of this phenomenon remains alarmingly limited. This project aims to elucidate the physiological mechanisms and operational principles that govern spontaneous network dynamics (termed here "brain network dynamics" - BND). To achieve these goals, I will establish an integrated research platform that combines advanced manipulations and recordings of BND in the awake mouse brain. To comprehensively probe the mechanisms that operate BND, I will carry out two complementary sets of causal manipulations that are conceptualized as exogenous or endogenous neuromodulation, depending on whether they encompass synthetic (optogenetically generated, Aim 1) or intrinsic (neurotransmitter related, Aim 2) modulatory mechanisms, respectively. Using this approach, I will (a) uncover the rhythms that causally sustain BND, and establish how BND causally responds to (and can be controlled by) mechanistically-precise exogenous neuromodulation; (b) empirically test the hypothesis that cholinergic and noradrenergic transmission cooperatively control the intrinsic organization of BND, as well the selective engagement of higher-order cortical systems relevant for attention and cognition. Crucially, multiscale network activity will be theoretically linked to dynamical regimes (brain states) of translational relevance via quantitative analyses. This research will address fundamental questions regarding the neural mechanisms governing BND and the possibility of controlling its organization via targeted exogenous modulation, with important implications for basic, theoretical and translational neuroscience.

Mots-clés : resting state fmri connectomics neuromodulation default mode network,large scale modelling brain stimulation,spontaneous brain activity meg
Projet ERC : DYONCON (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université libre de Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1295048.75 €

Transport phenomena of molecules and ions inside porous materials are paramount in various fields, ranging from energy storage and transformation to molecular separation. In advanced energy storage devices, like supercapacitors and batteries, ions are confined in small pores. Nanoconfinement effects change the ion properties and enhance the performance, vital for saving resources and energy. So far, the static properties of nanoconfined ions are thoroughly studied but there is little known about the dynamic properties of ions in nanopores, mainly attributed to the lack of suitable experimental model systems. In DYONCON, the dynamic properties of nanoconfined ions will be explored by using well-defined, tunable model systems. This is realized by combining two exclusive material classes: ionic liquids, ILs, which are room-temperature molten salts of organic molecules, and films of metal-organic frameworks, MOFs. MOF films provide the variable, crystalline, scaffold-like container for the ion confinement. An applied electric field will act on the nanoconfined ILs, causing its directed movements. Controlling the dynamic properties of the nanoconfined ions will lead to myriad advances of safety and efficiency concerns, including enhanced charging rates of energy storage devices. In a radical new approach, DYONCON will also show that nanoconfined ions provide unprecedented functionalities. Based on the functional uniformity of IL@MOF membranes, the nano-level control of the confined ions will be used to regulate macroscopic gas fluxes with ultrafast switching rates, orders of magnitude faster than conventional gas valves. DYONCON aims to enhance the potentials of electrochemical technologies in energy storage, in sensors and in iontronics. The benefits of DYONCON will not only impact the improvement of speed, quality and control in existing technologies, but it will change the way we look at mobile confined ions and launch us into new methods of using nanomaterials.
Projet ERC : HIGH (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université d'Uppsala — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999259.0 €

Quantum field theories (QFTs) are among the most powerful tools of modern theoretical physics, with wide applications from condensed matter to elementary particle physics, phase transitions, and quantum gravity. Over the past decade, and with tremendous progress over the past two years, QFT is undergoing a revolution: a generalized notion of symmetries, capable of giving conserved quantum numbers to extended field configurations, has emerged. Generalized symmetries are radically changing many aspects of the formalism, with applications ranging from the stability of impurities and defects in condensed matter systems, to the physics of hadrons in the standard model, as well as to the structures of phases. The hallmark of generalized symmetries is their higher structure, which encodes much more refined and sophisticated information about the QFT than that of ordinary symmetries.  The goal of this reaserch proposal is to consolidate my research team, which will be devoted to develop and exploit the higher structure of symmetries to attack foundational open questions about QFT. In particular, in this project we will exploit the higher structures to obtain novel selection rules on QFT correlators, to constrain the behavior of quantum fields upon phase transitions and dualities, and most importantly to give new tools to study the behavior of QFTs across different energy scales along the flow of renormalization. To this end we are exploiting two different strategies. Firstly, we capitalize on the description of generalized symmetries as topological membranes, which allows the characterization of the higher structure via QFT correlators and topological field theory techniques. Secondly, we use a combination of tools ranging from dualities to higher dimensional QFT, and strings geometry, to probe regimes that are out of reach of more conventional methods. These strategies are complementary and intertwined.

Mots-clés : symmetries,quantum field theory,geometric engineering,superconformal
Projet ERC : PlastidOrigin (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université d'Uppsala — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997978.0 €

Photosynthesis was acquired by eukaryotes through endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria, which resulted in new cellular organelles: the plastids. From the origin of plastids evolved the first eukaryotic algae, giving rise to land plants but also triggering the evolution of most photosynthetic eukaryotes by subsequent endosymbioses between these first algae and other eukaryotes. Thus, the origin of plastids profoundly changed the course of eukaryotic life by being the launching point that shaped the biological diversity of most primary producers. Despite this importance, our understanding of how plastids originated remains largely uncertain. The current paradigm describes this transformative event as a single primary endosymbiosis, but I argue here that critical data is lacking, notably from the vast hidden environmental diversity of microbes, to adequately test this hypothesis. In this project, I propose to gain insight into the origin of plastids by addressing the main questions: 1) What is the currently hidden diversity of high-ranked taxa related to primary photosynthetic lineages? 2) What are the feeding behaviors of these taxa and are they aplastidic? 3) Are some lineages genetically predisposed to establish plastids from the acquisition of foreign genes? 4) What was the composition, size, and origin of the ancestral primary plastid proteomes? To answer these questions, I will link third generation environmental sequencing, transcriptomics, and genomics to cell structure and behavior of novel key lineages related to primary algae, and produce crucially missing plastid proteomes to allow comprehensive comparative proteomic analysis. My project will not only have immediate implications on our understanding of the origin of plastids and more generally the fundamental process of endosymbiosis, but the approaches developed will be a test bed for future global studies aimed at understanding the evolution and ecology of the microbial majority of complex life.

Mots-clés : plastid origin,endosymbiosis,microbial eukaryotes,single cell organisms,unicellular,archaeplastida,red algae,single cell transcriptomics,metabarcoding,culture free,culture,hyperlopit,plastid proteomes,protein mass spectrometry,phylogenomics