Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : GEOASTRONOMY (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Bayreuth — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3435590.0 €

Billions of rocky worlds likely exist around Sun-like stars in our Galaxy. Yet, attempts to understand these exoplanets lack information on the elements that compose them, the geodynamic processes that drive them, and the atmospheres that cloak them. To meet these cross-disciplinary challenges, three PIs at three institutes have combined forces to break new ground in understanding fully-formed silicate+metal+fluid (i.e. ‘rocky’) exoplanets. By synergizing astronomical data analysis with planetary geochemistry and experimental petrology and atmospheric physics/chemistry, we deviate from a purely theoretical approach via forward modeling. Instead, we blend Bayesian inference applied to telescope data and laboratory experiments with theory. Our thesis is straightforward: An exoplanet’s geologic history can only be decoded indirectly through spectroscopic observations of its atmosphere. To take advantage of remote observations of such atmospheres by next-generation telescopes we must work to understand how and why exoplanets have the physical and chemical properties they do. We devote our closely aligned efforts towards three categories of worlds around Sun-like (FGK) stars well-studied by astronomers: sub-Neptunes (exoplanets smaller than Neptune), Super Earths (exoplanets slightly larger than Earth) and “ultra-short period” (USP) exoplanets that may harbour magma oceans and atmospheres. GEOASTRONOMY fuses principles of the Geosciences with Astrophysics. Our aim is to build the chemical foundations for the exoplanet community to understand secondary (outgassed), hybrid (commingled primary- and secondary-) and magma-ocean atmospheres of already assembled mature rocky exoplanets. The proposed work is urgent because new and emerging datasets, including those being collected by the James Webb Space Telescope, are already providing constraints on these three categories of atmospheres.

Mots-clés : exoplanet atmospheres,galactic chemical evolution,bayesian inference,experimental petrology
Projet ERC : INSIGHT (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 4000000.0 €

Earth's growing population puts immense pressure on ecosystems due to increasing demands for natural resources, which are transformed into materials or energy for human use. Chemical catalysis is our primary tool for converting molecules, and advancements over the last century have made these processes more sustainable. While catalysis holds promise for addressing the urgent need for efficient, sustainable resource conversion, current discovery and optimization methods are too slow to meet global demands. The INSIGHT project, a collaboration between a synthetic chemist, mass spectrometry expert, and theoretical chemist, aims to accelerate this process. We are developing a workflow that rapidly generates knowledge in catalysis. Building on our discovery of adaptive dynamic catalysis, where the physical state of a metal ion is maintained in its active form by external stimuli (light or electrons), we integrate this approach with flow mass spectrometry. This enables us to explore an unprecedented number of parameter permutations, identify successful reactions, and gather kinetic data, which will inform theoretical models and provide deep insights into catalytic systems. Our project unfolds in three stages: First, we refine mass spectrometry techniques, generate data, and build models using well-established chemistry for cross-coupling carbon-halogen bonds. Next, we apply our discovery workflow to the underexplored area of carbon-oxygen bond activation, which holds significant potential for sustainable catalysis. Finally, we demonstrate the power of our method by tackling one of chemistry’s greatest challenges—carbon-carbon bond activation. By exploring a much larger chemical space for this transformation and using model-based knowledge generation, we aim to uncover innovative catalytic solutions that address some of the world’s most pressing resource challenges. This accelerated approach may revolutionize chemical catalysis, offering sustainable solutions.

Mots-clés : photoredox catalysis reaction monitoring in situ mass spectrometry
Projet ERC : n-AQUA (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
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 : 3321612.75 €

Water is a substance that needs no introduction: It shapes our blue planet, is life-enabling, and scientifically fascinating with a host of anomalous behaviours. Despite centuries of studies, breakthroughs in the last decade have shown that when wWater is an abundant, yet exceptional and life-enabling substance. The past decades have seen tremendous progress in our understanding of the many peculiarities of water, many of which can be traced to the nature of the interactions between water molecules. When confining water to nanometer-range pores and cavities, wholly new and unexpected phenomena appear: water flows differently in confinement, its phase diagram changes drastically, and conventional theories break down. This is exciting from a scientific perspective, but also of great technological importance: nanoscale water is fundamental to water purification and desalination, where water has to flow through nanopores, and for energy-related processes as a source of protons and hydrogen. Here, we aim for fundamental new scientific insights into water at key length- and time-scales by bringing together a critical mass of researchers with complementarity skillsets in nanofluidics, spectroscopy, and theory and simulation. We follow a radically new perspective for nanoscale water transport, envisioning confined water not only in terms of real-space confinement, but also in terms of its collective modes: how they couple and resonate with the confining material and its - quantum - excitations to affect global transport. Seeing water dynamics in both the real and Fourier worlds allows us to naturally address quantum couplings and light- matter interactions and their effect at nanoscales. This opens a new world of possibilities, e.g., by controlling water motion through fine-tuning of its excitations, quantum engineering of water transport is made possible. Such views have the potential to enable world-changing novel technologies in the water-energy nexus and related fields.

Mots-clés : water,molecular scale friction,transport control,in situ spectroscopy,nano fluidics,electronic structure
Projet ERC : TREATLIVMETS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Institut Gustave Roussy — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IGR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2332750.0 €

Liver metastases commonly develop in up to 50% of patients with various cancer types. The most common cancer that metastasizes to the liver is colorectal cancer (CRC). At least 25% of CRC patients develop colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) during their illness. CRLM represent the major unmet clinical need for this malignancy, as the 5-year survival rate of patients with unresectable disease does not exceed 2%. New therapies that promote antitumor immunity have been recently developed, mostly focusing on enhancing T cell responses. Although these therapies have led to unprecedented successes, only a minority of patients benefit from these treatments, highlighting the need to identify new cells and molecules that could be exploited in next generation immunotherapies. Given the crucial role of innate immune responses in immunity, targeting these responses opens up new possibilities for tumour control. We hypothesize that the immunotherapy of liver metastases can be significantly improved through harnessing the biology of innate lymphoid cells (ILC), such as Natural Killer (NK) cells and ILC1s, and myeloid cells such as macrophages and DCs. Our team brings together experts in the biology of tissue-resident myeloid (Ginhoux, PI4) and lymphoid (Gasteiger, cPI) cells, in liver immunology (Fumagalli, PI3), and in the development of novel immunotherapeutic strategies that modulate immune cells in the fight against cancer (Vivier, PI2). By combining cutting-edge single cell and spatial transcriptomics of human patient samples with cross-species analyses in advanced genetic mouse models, we aim (1) to identify cellular interactions defining the metastatic tumor microenvironment across murine and human tissue-specimens, (2) to investigate immune cell functions regulating metastatic disease using a unique combination of advanced genetic mouse and human tissue models, and (3) to harness the anti-tumoral functions of innate immune cells via next generation cell engagers.

Mots-clés : liver immunology,liver metastasis
Projet ERC : Green2Ice (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université du Manitoba — Pays : Canada — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UofM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 50000.0 €

Green2Ice will investigate the deepest and oldest ice and basal sediments drilled from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). Ice cores have been drilled the last 55 years, but the deepest ice containing basal materials has been preserved until now, and still holds undeciphered paleoclimatic messages. The breakthrough of Green2Ice is to develop and apply cutting edge dating methods on this unique sample collection and hence to reconstruct the age and the stability of the GrIS. A hypothesis to test is if the present GrIS formed at the time of the Mid Pleistocene Transition, 1,2 - 0.8 million years ago. One innovation of Green2Ice is to gain paleo-information of the past size of the GrIS to constrain future tipping points. This knowledge will reduce the uncertainty on estimates of future sea level rise. Green2Ice will bring together four PIs from three world leading institutions with complementary skills to lift this strongly interdisciplinary program. We will drill a replicate core at GRIP, to supplement the available material from five existing ice cores and ensure retrieval of sediments and rock material from beneath the GrIS summit. We will develop, improve and apply novel dating techniques (cosmogenic and radiogenic nuclides, OSL/IRSL, modeling of gas and isotope diffusion) to place constraints on past waxing and waning of the GrIS. State-of-the-art methodologies on fossil remains, organic matter, in situ produced and consumed greenhouse gases, and ancient bio-molecules will provide insights on the types of ecosystems and environmental conditions that emerged during ice-free conditions. Interpretation will include ice sheet modelling with data benchmarking to establish the climatic sensitivity of the GrIS. Earth system modelling and collaboration with the groups preparing the IPCC AR7 will bring the knowledge of the past into the future. The rare and unique basal ice and material can only be used once. This is the main high risk high gain component of Green2Ice.

Mots-clés : greenland ice sheet,mid pleistocene transition,ice free greenland,ecosystem,mass loss,sea level rise
Projet ERC : CircuitEvolution (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : UK Research and Innovation — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKRI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 7951198.5 €

Animals display remarkable diversity in their behaviors, yet very little is known about how nervous systems evolve to generate such variation. CircuitEvolution will answer two fundamental questions: 1. How does brain wiring change across species as novel behavioral traits evolve? 2. What core features of brain circuits are deeply conserved across species? We will use electron microscopy connectomics, the only method that enables unbiased, brain-wide structural analysis of the synaptic connectivity between all neurons. Building on recent rapid progress in Drosophila melanogaster, the frontier of whole brain connectomics, we will target drosophilids at a strategically selected range of evolutionary divergences. Two PIs (Cardona, Jefferis) are pioneers in Drosophila connectomics, and our third PI (Ruta) and collaborators (Prieto-Godino, Benton) have pioneered molecular genetic investigation of behavioral and circuit evolution across drosophilids. Crucially, with our fourth PI (statistical physicist, Sales Pardo), we will identify conserved and divergent neurons and circuits across increasingly distant species, developing new inference methods for connectome alignment, simplification, and neuron annotation. Working together on this project we can develop a new field of whole-brain comparative connectomics. With cutting edge technology, we will obtain and share multiple connectomes for 7 species. These unique datasets will allow comparisons across species, sexes and developmental stages and support three areas of biological investigation within this grant: olfactory circuits, courtship behavior and the conserved core of the insect brain. This will generate many hypotheses that will be tested experimentally by the PIs, collaborators and laboratories worldwide. The insights and methods will have a major impact on understanding conserved and evolving circuit function across phyla all the way to mammalian brains and impact the design of artificial intelligence systems.

Mots-clés : connectomics,neuronal evolution,neural circuits,drosophila,olfaction,sexual dimorphism,network analysis
Projet ERC : CultCryo (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Hambourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 325982.5 €

Artificial cooling fundamentally shapes the world in which we live. Since the onset of the Cold War, cooling and freezing technologies have become increasingly vital for a wide array of everyday practices, from nutrition, health and reproduction to dwelling, telecommunication, scientific research and economic productivity. A global system of cold storages, cold chains and air-conditioned spaces has become an energy-intensive yet barely considered planetary infrastructure: an “artificial cryosphere”. Artificial cold has drastically restructured life both on a biological and social level, yet the far-reaching impact of this technology is still largely unexplored and unresearched. Recent studies estimate that global cooling demand will increase five-fold by 2050, dramatically exceeding our future energy budget and urgently calling for change. CultCryo argues that avoiding the impending global cooling crisis will be impossible if we do not understand how the planetary infrastructure of artificial cold is deeply interwoven in cultural practices. Thus, in order to analyze the constitution of “cryogenic cultures”, we will undertake four interdisciplinary multi-sited case studies in the domains of food supply, air conditioning, biomedicine and computing. We develop innovative approaches using mixed-methods rooted in the history of technology, geography, digital history of concepts, ethnography and the philosophy and ethics of technology. Breaking ground for an innovative interdisciplinary field of research, CultCryo will provide the first geographical mapping of the cryosphere, a historical reconstruction of its emergence, an ethnographic account on its cultural constitution, and a philosophical analysis and ethical assessment of its underlying norms and values. Thereby, we develop a corpus of urgently needed knowledge to critically analyze a pressing global phenomenon while also identifying alternatives towards a more sustainable future of artificial cold.

Mots-clés : ethnography,technology assessment,language technology,digital history of concepts,cultural analysis,value analysis and theory,cryopreservation,cooling,infrastructures,public health,sustainability,
Projet ERC : TREATLIVMETS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Aix-Marseille Université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : amU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2371465.0 €

Liver metastases commonly develop in up to 50% of patients with various cancer types. The most common cancer that metastasizes to the liver is colorectal cancer (CRC). At least 25% of CRC patients develop colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) during their illness. CRLM represent the major unmet clinical need for this malignancy, as the 5-year survival rate of patients with unresectable disease does not exceed 2%. New therapies that promote antitumor immunity have been recently developed, mostly focusing on enhancing T cell responses. Although these therapies have led to unprecedented successes, only a minority of patients benefit from these treatments, highlighting the need to identify new cells and molecules that could be exploited in next generation immunotherapies. Given the crucial role of innate immune responses in immunity, targeting these responses opens up new possibilities for tumour control. We hypothesize that the immunotherapy of liver metastases can be significantly improved through harnessing the biology of innate lymphoid cells (ILC), such as Natural Killer (NK) cells and ILC1s, and myeloid cells such as macrophages and DCs. Our team brings together experts in the biology of tissue-resident myeloid (Ginhoux, PI4) and lymphoid (Gasteiger, cPI) cells, in liver immunology (Fumagalli, PI3), and in the development of novel immunotherapeutic strategies that modulate immune cells in the fight against cancer (Vivier, PI2). By combining cutting-edge single cell and spatial transcriptomics of human patient samples with cross-species analyses in advanced genetic mouse models, we aim (1) to identify cellular interactions defining the metastatic tumor microenvironment across murine and human tissue-specimens, (2) to investigate immune cell functions regulating metastatic disease using a unique combination of advanced genetic mouse and human tissue models, and (3) to harness the anti-tumoral functions of innate immune cells via next generation cell engagers.

Mots-clés : liver immunology,liver metastasis
Projet ERC : CultCryo (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MLU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 357435.0 €

Artificial cooling fundamentally shapes the world in which we live. Since the onset of the Cold War, cooling and freezing technologies have become increasingly vital for a wide array of everyday practices, from nutrition, health and reproduction to dwelling, telecommunication, scientific research and economic productivity. A global system of cold storages, cold chains and air-conditioned spaces has become an energy-intensive yet barely considered planetary infrastructure: an “artificial cryosphere”. Artificial cold has drastically restructured life both on a biological and social level, yet the far-reaching impact of this technology is still largely unexplored and unresearched. Recent studies estimate that global cooling demand will increase five-fold by 2050, dramatically exceeding our future energy budget and urgently calling for change. CultCryo argues that avoiding the impending global cooling crisis will be impossible if we do not understand how the planetary infrastructure of artificial cold is deeply interwoven in cultural practices. Thus, in order to analyze the constitution of “cryogenic cultures”, we will undertake four interdisciplinary multi-sited case studies in the domains of food supply, air conditioning, biomedicine and computing. We develop innovative approaches using mixed-methods rooted in the history of technology, geography, digital history of concepts, ethnography and the philosophy and ethics of technology. Breaking ground for an innovative interdisciplinary field of research, CultCryo will provide the first geographical mapping of the cryosphere, a historical reconstruction of its emergence, an ethnographic account on its cultural constitution, and a philosophical analysis and ethical assessment of its underlying norms and values. Thereby, we develop a corpus of urgently needed knowledge to critically analyze a pressing global phenomenon while also identifying alternatives towards a more sustainable future of artificial cold.

Mots-clés : ethnography,technology assessment,language technology,digital history of concepts,cultural analysis,value analysis and theory,cryopreservation,cooling,infrastructures,public health,sustainability,
Projet ERC : ROTTnROCK (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GFZ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2651605.0 €

More than 10% of the world’s population are at risk to the direct impacts of volcanic eruptions. Volcano monitoring aims to detect and correctly interpret volcanic hazards and to provide early and accurate warnings of impending eruptions. Yet, despite technical and scientific advances, volcanoes still produce unexpected explosive eruptions or sudden flank collapses. Each year, such unpredictable events result in volcanic disasters that devastate unprepared communities and destroy unprotected infrastructures. Previous work by the PIs indicates that volcanic hazards are caused by hydrothermal alteration, which progressively and imperceptibly changes the chemical and physical state of rocks inside a volcano, creating a soft and unstable (or “rotten”) interior. However, the link between “soft” volcanoes and unpredictable volcanic events remains enigmatic. The ROTTnROCK project aims to achieve a ground-breaking advance in our understanding of hydrothermal alteration processes that act inside active volcanic systems. Specifically, we will identify where and at which scales alteration occurs (WP1), explore the chemical fingerprint of alteration and effects on rock properties and strength using laboratory methods (WP2), and develop 4D volcano stability simulations and, therefore, an innovative and optimised hazard assessment workflow (WP3). The ROTTnROCK project combines innovative approaches from traditionally distinct geoscience disciplines (remote sensing, mineralogy and chemistry, rock mechanics, and modelling). This project will revolutionise our understanding of hydrothermal alteration and its effects on volcano hazards, and pave the way for strategies to forecast and mitigate unexpected volcanic events caused by hydrothermal alteration and circumvent disasters at volcanoes worldwide.

Mots-clés : hydrothermal alteration,rock weakening,risk awareness