Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : fitsCAN (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Stockholm County Council — Pays : Suède — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 280345.0 €

In extracorporeal organ support (ECOS), one or more organ functions fail and are replaced by an artificial device. Kidney failure requires hemodialysis, at least until transplantation. Temporary lung- and/or heart-failure may be treated by Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO). About 1.5 Million patients require hemodialysis worldwide. ECMO has an essential life-saving role during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as during the Influenzae H1N1 pandemic in 2009. In ECOS, two or more accesses are used; one for blood drainage and another to return oxygenated blood. The flow rate in the cannula and the cannulated blood vessels is often significantly higher than physiologically experienced. The high flow velocity implies larger forces (stress) acting on the blood cells and the vessel walls. Thromboembolism and morphological and mechanical changes in the affected blood vessel are common complications in ECOS. This project focus on the impact of blood flow on these complications. Patient-specific data (CT, MRI and Ultrasound based) will be used to construct laboratory and simulation relevant frameworks. Set-ups for measurement of flow and mixing in-vitro will be used. Simulations will include modeling of transport of chemical species and blood cells along with modeling of platelet activation and risk for thrombus formation. The different tools will enable a considerably better understanding of the underlying pathological processes. The results will support further model development of these processes and facilitate improved cannulation techniques and new devices. These propositions are to be assessed by our clinical partners. Therefore, the project group includes, fluid mechanical expertise, and also clinical specialist in nephrology, intensive care/ECMO, and radiology. The outcome of research will enable device development and clinical decision-making reducing overall treatment complications.

Mots-clés : blood flow,ecmo,hemodialysis,cannula flow,thrombosis,stenosis,cross disciplinary
Projet ERC : WRAP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, 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 : 1999870.0 €

Understanding the evolutionary journey of our species demands an exploration into the diverse environments that our earliest ancestors inhabited. This involves investigating the impact that these landscapes had on the cultural and biological adaptations of early Homo. The Western Rift Archaeological and Paleoenvironment (WRAP) Project directly addresses this important topic by answering the question: How and when did Homo ergaster adapt to the diverse ecotone environments of the Western Rift compared to the more open mosaic environments of the East African Rift? While historically, the unique adaptability of early Homo has been linked to open savanna grasslands, recent studies challenge this notion, proposing that a broader range of environments influenced their adaptive flexibility. However, these hypotheses heavily rely on geographically limited research areas biased toward mosaic open grassland landscapes in Eastern and Southern Africa.  Beyond these historically well-studied regions, lies the Albertine Rift in Uganda, a unique biodiversity hotspot and ecological ecotone between Central African tropical forests and East African savannah grasslands. During the Pleistocene, although increasingly arid, this region possessed a similar diverse range of tropical humid environments as today. Recognizing the need to search beyond the intensively studied ecologically similar regions of Eastern and Southern Africa, to areas with evidence of Pleistocene hominin occupation in new, diverse environments, this innovative project will conduct extensive fieldwork to identify new archaeological sites within the Western Rift of Uganda. Through systematic surveys and targeted excavations, combined with cutting-edge remote sensing, biomolecular, and geochronological analyses the WRAP Project will, for the first time, provide a holistic understanding of Pleistocene hominins occupations and behaviour across the Western Rift’s diverse biomes.
Projet ERC : BreastRecon (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
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 €

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer globally, affecting 13% of women in their lifetime. For those women who undergo a mastectomy, breast reconstruction has become an integral part of their treatment. While two stage implant-based reconstructions are by far the most common procedure, they are sub-optimal: They suffer from high complication rates and low patient satisfaction. The first stage of implant based reconstructions involves the insertion of a tissue expander, silicone implants gradually inflated below the skin over several weeks to induce new skin growth. Improving patient outcomes and patient satisfaction requires a deep understanding of the biomechanical mechanisms associated with growing new tissue and the challenges associated with predicting its future behaviour. However, the lack of adequate in vivo techniques to evaluate and predict the amount of tissue growth is an obstacle to effective surgical planning. BreastRecon aims to address these challenges by developing a novel acoustoelastic method which can non-invasively determine key biomechanical parameters. Specific objectives of BreastRecon include (i) the development of a wearable surface wave device for clinical in vivo measurements (ii) the quantification of in vivo tension using the device (iii) the non-invasive determination of tissue growth and (iv) the development of a real-time optimisation procedure for the design of tissue expansion protocols. To achieve these ambitious goals, BreastRecon employs a distinctive combination of acoustoelastic tissue measurements, physics-based machine learning techniques and novel device development. BreastRecon will initially provide a tool to monitor tissue growth in vivo, offering valuable fundamental insights into growth and remodelling processes. Ultimately, it will advance patient-specific tissue expansions by designing optimum protocols based on individual biomechanical measurements, offering a disruptive breakthrough in reconstructive surgeries.

Mots-clés : skin biomechanics,skin growth,rayleigh waves
Projet ERC : ReKINdle (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, 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 €

Legal parenthood (i.e. the package of legal recognition, rights and obligation that typically attaches to the parent-child nexus) has undergone incremental change in response to scientific developments in assisted reproductive technology (ART) and human rights challenges but has fragmented due to its inadequacy to reflect the complexity of modern family life. The legal rules establishing the parent-child link now encompass different and conflicting regulatory functions at the same time – establishing legal identity, managing adult behaviour, marking family deservingness, and acting as genealogical information. As society has become more diverse, more children’s rights focussed, more tolerant of different family forms, and more internationally mobile, these different and competing regulatory functions can no longer be fulfilled by an anachronistic adult status. ReKINdle provides a new way to think about the legal nexus between parent and child, not as an adult status, but as a two-way legal interdependency between parent and child. Every country in Europe predicates parenthood on maternity by birth with a separate legal regime for children conceived through ART. ReKINdle goes beyond tinkering with legal rules assigning parentage to rethink the entire basis of family law. ReKINdle interrogates the historical, legal and social dimensions of legal parenthood in Ireland, England and Wales, Sweden and Poland to expose the gaps between the regulatory work that the concept of legal parenthood is currently doing and the social expectations that are placed on the concept. This radical approach assesses how legal parenthood works in a holistic fashion, investigating lived experiences of parents and children navigating different life stages. ReKINdle also examines the limits and perspectives surrounding state policing of parental status using prefigurative law to explores new ways of thinking from state perspectives.

Mots-clés : family law legal parenthood children s rights to identity
Projet ERC : Vortex (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Lyon-I université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Lyon I
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1385000.0 €

The main goal of this project is to understand the geometry of the deeply influential topological phase transitions which were discovered in the 70's by Berezinskii, Kosterlitz and Thouless. The archetypal example of such phase transitions arises in the 2d XY model in which topological defects, called vortices, behave very differently at small and high temperature. The mathematical understanding of this rich phenomenon goes back to the work of Fröhlich and Spencer in the 80's and involves the 2d Coulomb gas. This project is aimed at analyzing this phase transition through the prism of random fractal geometry by associating natural percolating sets to the XY model whose behavior will depend crucially on the temperature. One constant source of inspiration will be the deep geometric content and powerful probabilistic methods gathered over the last 20 years for celebrated discrete symmetry models such as 2d critical Ising or percolation. New tools will be brought in, among which the recent works of the PI with Sepúlveda which analyze the 2d Coulomb gas and make connections with Bayesian statistics.  Since the early days of topological phase transitions, topological defects have been found to arise also in some discrete symmetry spin systems as well as in Abelian lattice gauge theory in 4d. This project will explore the geometry of these by making several novel and fruitful connections with the dimer and Ising models.  The new connections made with statistical reconstruction and Bayesian statistics will give access to the even more fascinating and least understood world of spin systems with non-Abelian (gauge-)symmetry. Finally, we shall investigate the mechanisms which relate the microscopic background noise with the large scale structures it induces in the contexts of Quantum Field Theory and KPZ fixed point. The impact of this project will go well beyond the current understanding of topological phase transitions in a wide variety of settings where they arise.

Mots-clés : kosterlitz thouless transition,coulomb gas,xy model,lattice gauge theory,gaussian free field,discrete beta ensembles,kpz fixed point,ising model,critical percolation,dynamical percolation,noise sensitivity,planar statistical physics
Projet ERC : PHASEBOT (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Consolidator grants)
Entité participante : Université de Stuttgart — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997050.0 €

We are in the middle of a revolution in which intelligent systems transform our lives and work. Soft robots have shown great promise in important applications such as medicine, search-and-rescue, and object manipulation. However, we do not see them in the real world. One reason is the struggle to execute complex motions with soft robots due to the complexity of controlling many soft actuators in a single system. PHASEBOT proposes the continuous propagation of mechanical first-order phase transitions as a ground-breaking new method for generating complex motion patterns in easy-to-control soft robots. PHASEBOT will devise a framework for embodying motion patterns in soft actuators with phase transitions using fluid-driven soft actuators as a model system (Objective 1). Functional soft materials allow for active control of the behavior of phase transitions to generate and control motion patterns. We will develop strategies to generate a large variety of motions using electrostatic forces as an example mechanism (Objective 2). We will implement the developed concepts in advanced soft robotic systems (Objective 3) to demonstrate the benefits of motion control with phase transitions. Advantages include the generation of complex, versatile motion in simple soft robots, high-performance untethered soft robotic devices, and control concepts that drastically simplify the control of complex soft robots. This ambitious work will involve theoretical analysis and experiments. A structured research program that progresses from model systems to advanced robots ensures its feasibility. PHASEBOT offers a new paradigm for motion control, which can be applied to many soft robotic systems. Thus, PHASEBOT will serve as a foundation for future research and the design of a new generation of high-performance soft robots.

Mots-clés : soft robotics,phase transitions,nonlinear mechanics,instabilities,soft matter physics,fluid driven actuators,electrostatic actuators
Projet ERC : DOSAGE2FUNC (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : KTH Institut royal de technologie — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1993059.0 €

The expression dosage of a gene is a fundamental determinant of its downstream function at the cellular and organismal level, and its genetic or environmental perturbations are a driving force of most common and rare disease in humans. However, we have limited understanding of the specific shape of dosage-to function-curves for human genes, what factors and mechanisms drive their variation across genes, phenotypes and cellular contexts, and how this contributes to functional architecture of human traits. This project addresses these questions using large human genetic data sets and cutting-edge experimental approaches. Using blood cell traits as our study system, we will characterize the relationship between gene dosage and cellular and physiological function in in unprecedented scale and depth. This addresses fundamental questions in systems biology and produces insights that can also benefit genomic medicine and drug development. The Work Packages of this study will: 1) Establish the dosage-to-function relationship for hundreds of human genes, associating genetically driven gene dosage to blood cell traits in large human genetic data, and by an innovative CRISPR-based experimental approach that maps gene dosage changes to multiple cellular phenotypes; 2) Elucidate how cellular the dosage-to-cellular-function relationships differ between cellular states, and use single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze how regulatory networks mediate context-specific dosage-to-function effects; 3) Characterize upstream genomic and environmental regulators of gene dosage. This project will build the first comprehensive, generalizable picture of gene dosage-to-function relationships in humans. Our analysis will link these insights to functional architecture of human traits, providing unique generalizable insights into how disruption of gene dosage and regulatory networks underlies human traits at the cellular and physiological level.

Mots-clés : complex disease
Projet ERC : STEMMA (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université nationale d'Irlande à Galway — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1864593.0 €

STEMMA offers the first large-scale quantitative analysis of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript between 1475 and 1700. It addresses a significant gap by developing innovative computational methods for studying the social and material forces that informed literary culture. Scholars have tended to address individual manuscripts as case studies. In contrast, STEMMA revolutionizes the study of manuscript poetry by taking a data-driven approach to identify patterns and trends at scale. At its centre is the poet John Donne, whose reluctance to circulate his verse makes the survival of at least 4,249 manuscripts of his work all the more puzzling; the poems of his next most-circulated contemporary survive in fewer than 1,000 witnesses. To understand how Donne’s poems, and early modern poetry more generally, circulated throughout the English-speaking world, the project synthesizes six of the most comprehensive datasets about early modern manuscripts and applies insights from social network analysis and graph theory to model the larger transcontinental communications system. The project’s objectives are to provide the first comprehensive study of early modern English manuscript verse circulation; to combine, augment, and enrich the most important bibliographical datasets and return them as Linked Open Data; to develop transferable and extensible methods for analysing the circulation of manuscript poetry; to offer a thoroughly revised account of the production and circulation of literary manuscripts after the introduction of print; to provoke a reassessment of historical metanarratives that privilege print and obscure the diverse agents who participated in early modern literary culture; and to facilitate new modes of research and discovery. The project offers benefits for scholars of early modern Europe as well as those working on computational and digital projects addressing a range of time periods, national traditions, and disciplinary orientations.

Mots-clés : early modern literature early modern poetry sixteenth century literature seventeenth century literature english literature manuscript studies computational methods quantitative methods digital humanities social network analysis historical network analysis
Projet ERC : COOPERATION (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

This project will recapture the lost archives and historical knowledge of international public health cooperation between the ‘global north’ and the ‘global south’ by analysing its first and longest-lasting instances: the sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Established in Tangier, Alexandria, Tunis, Istanbul and Tehran, these unprecedented institutions strategised against waves of epidemics and pandemics between the 1790s and the 1940s. Their European, American and native co-founders invented new models for fighting pandemics from below and stopping the diseases in their tracks. They continually strove to overcome the familiar barriers to cooperation posed by inter-imperial competition in a multipolar world, economic inequities, protests against quarantine restrictions and racial and Orientalist biases, among others. In this light, the councils constituted the microcosms of the complex dynamics of north-south health cooperation that also need to be addressed urgently today. However, to date, there has been no in-depth, comparative and longitudinal analysis of their workings. This project will challenge the mainstream narratives by writing an entangled, rather than West-centric, history of health cooperation and by shifting the focus from top-down to bottom-up processes. It will determine what the preconditions for effective international public health cooperation in MENA were and hypothesise that rather than Great Power imposition or veiled imperialism alone, multifaceted reciprocal action induced and sustained sanitary internationalism on the ground. My preliminary data show that the agency of local actors and smaller and medium European powers in accrediting public health cooperation was more central than has been documented to date. This research will test my hypothesis by examining the councils’ activity, performance, legitimacy and endurance, and by consulting archival sources in Europe, MENA, North America and Russia.

Mots-clés : international public health cooperation,pandemics,middle east and north africa,diplomatic history,entangled history
Projet ERC : Ghostbuster (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The hypothalamus contains heterogeneous neurons that dictate behaviours and physiological functions through cross-talk mechanisms with peripheral hormones. Neuronal diversity is the key to enabling hypothalamic functions and, according to the neuroscience dogma, is mainly preset during embryonic life. But what if this model is incorrect? Can neuronal heterogeneity be plastically modulated throughout adult life as well? Here, based on my published work and solid preliminary results, I propose that special 'Ghost' neurons in the hypothalamus display plastic mechanisms of cell-identity reprogramming to accommodate neuroendocrine functions in adult life under physiological conditions. Such identity plasticity can become maladaptive and contribute to neuroendocrine disorders such as obesity. My central hypothesis is that atypical 'Ghost' neurons are hidden within mature populations of neuroendocrine brain neurons. The Ghostbuster project will hunt down these brain cells and uncover their role in physiology and metabolic disease. A multidisciplinary approach will be used toward this goal, uniting lineage tracing strategies, nutritional interventions, single-cell profiling of hypothalamic neurons, bioinformatic analyses, and viral-based tools for targeting Ghost cell-related genes. These strategies will be combined with behavioural, metabolic and hormonal assessments of mice models of Ghost neuron loss or gain of function. The project will overturn the dogma that post-mitotic neurons have negligible cell-reprogramming capacity and revolutionise our understanding of how brain functions are plastically regulated throughout life. We will shed light on key molecular targets that allow the reprogramming of neuronal functional identity for therapeutic use and provide a novel framework for understanding the fundamental biological mechanisms that cause neuroendocrine disorders such as obesity, infertility, and beyond.

Mots-clés : hypothalamus,heterogeneity,cell identity,energy balance,reproduction,hormones