Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EarlyMicroAbs (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Université de médecine de Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1650000.0 €

Immunoglobulins (Igs) are thought to influence formation of the microbiota composition during a critical window of opportunity in early life. Yet, the antigen binding profiles of these Igs are vastly unknown, and it is incompletely understood how early misguided immune education contributes to the development of allergies or asthma. On an even more fundamental level, it is also unclear if or how B cell receptor (BCR) sequences of different individuals converge to binding similar microbiota antigens and how such responses form in early life.  Here, we will leverage phage display as well as novel approaches to study BCR sequence/Ig function relationships, focusing on the following objectives & research questions: a) How do immune exposures in early life shape Ig repertoires and influence health later on? We hypothesize that Ig repertoire development depends on the birth mode, duration of breast feeding, & antibiotics treatments. Here, we will deeply profile the Ig repertoires of mother-child dyads against 600,000 rationally selected microbiota antigens. We will also study the immune repertoires of children with allergies and mine these data sets for associations with early life Ig data sets. b) Do BCR sequences of different individuals converge to binding similar antigens? As observed for some viral antigens, we hypothesize that also universal responses towards bacterial antigens exist and we can capture such sequences in early life. We will apply state of the art and novel proprietary methodologies to link BCR sequences with Ig binding in adults & infants.  Linking BCR sequence information with the actual antigen targets, will contribute to understanding the sequence-function relationship of Ig binding and their formation in early life. Deep profiling of mother-child dyads will provide new insights to the development of Ig repertoires. By comparing these datasets with allergic children may also reveal links between early immune education & lasting impacts on health.

Mots-clés : microbiota,antibody repertoires,bcr sequences,window of opportunity,machine learning,data scienc,bioinformatics
Projet ERC : The B-MIracle (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Université de médecine de Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1475638.75 €

Survivors of acute myocardial infarction (MI) are at a particularly high risk for accelerated atherosclerosis and recurrent atherothromobosis. Nevertheless, mechanistic preclinical studies in atherosclerosis research world-wide are typically conducted in unchallenged (without MI) atherosclerosis-prone mice and thus do not address the specific pathophysiology of post-MI atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. We conducted a single-cell RNA sequencing coupled to B cell receptor (BCR) sequencing analysis of sorted CD45+ splenocytes from atherosclerosis-prone mice that were fed an atherogenic diet for eight weeks in total and were subjected four weeks after the initiation of the atherogenic diet feeding either to sham microsurgery or to permanent ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery to induce MI. We found that splenic mature B lymphocytes from atherosclerotic mice that suffered an MI display altered glucocorticoid-induced responses and a more diversified BCR repertoire, which contains twelve unique clonotypes (named B-MIracle clones) that are not present in atherosclerotic mice without MI. Here, I aim a) to investigate the effect of glucocorticoid-induced signaling in B cells in post-MI atherosclerosis in vivo by employing mouse models that allow the inducible genetic manipulation of different components of the glucocorticoid-induced signaling axis, b) by utilizing the full heavy and light chain nucleotide sequences from our single cell BCR-seq data, to clone and produce the respective antibodies of the B-MIracle clones and examine their effect in accelerated atherosclerosis after MI in vivo, and c) to address the relevance of these findings in atherosclerosis progression in patients with a recent MI, by analyzing sorted peripheral B cell subsets and serum samples. These studies may lead to the identification of precise therapeutic targets for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease.

Mots-clés : atherosclerosis,myocardial infarction,b lymphocytes
Projet ERC : ice cubed (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496941.0 €

Glaciers are key contributors to sea-level rise and are critical water resources that supply fresh water to hundreds of millions of people around the world. It is therefore of paramount importance to accurately simulate the future evolution of these precious ice bodies.  Despite recent progress in modelling the global evolution of glaciers, existing simulations suffer from vast uncertainties related to (i) model input, (ii) a simplified representation of glacier processes, and (iii) an important mismatch between the timescales over which models are calibrated (multi-annual to decadal) and those over which the future glacier projections occur (century timescale). ICE³ will revolutionise the regional- to global-scale modelling of glaciers, by (i) strongly reducing uncertainties in model input through innovative inversion of climatic information, (ii) developing new approaches to model glacier processes in 3D, and (iii) for the first time simulating past glacier evolution globally over centennial time scales with an ice-dynamic model.  These improvements will culminate in new global glacier evolution projections under a range of future emission scenarios, which will in turn inform the next generation of sea-level rise and water availability projections. While redefining the landscape of large-scale glacier modelling, ICE³ will also ensure that the novelties it produces are incorporated in climate change impact models to guide policymakers and practitioners in adapting to a changing environment.

Mots-clés : glacier climate change modelling
Projet ERC : SMADBINS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Chemnitz — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498624.0 €

The lack of an on-chip power source providing uninterrupted energy impedes the progress of smart dust in moving from lab-level demonstrations to everyday applications. Tiny generators relying on external energy sources face spatial and temporal limitations. Batteries with adequate energy are not available in an area of less than 1 mm2, and the reasons for their absence are manifold. Mainstream battery architectures require either thick or tall electrodes created by etching into the wafer, but it is very fiddly to deposit materials onto these electrodes without defects. High-capacity materials such as lithium cobalt oxide, sulfur and lithium metal are often excluded because on-chip techniques to synthesize or stabilize such materials are missing. Moreover, a low-power monitor to provide precise information about the energy storage state and battery health is essential for real applications but unexplored so far. These difficulties demand a paradigm shift in microbattery development to pursue novel approaches that offer energy-dense microbatteries integrable into microsystems. Therefore, we propose a micro-origami technology for on-chip microbatteries using aqueous zinc battery chemistry, together with embedded surveillance based on a non-volatile redox transistor with near-zero power consumption. SMADBINS is expected to bring advances in battery chemistry and materials and on-chip energy production and management, boosting research for microbattery and smart dust applications, as was recently highlighted by the PI [Nature, 2021, 589, 195]. The PI has decisively contributed to the field of aqueous microbatteries and developed the smart dust battery concept together with his team in several publications. However, a smart dust battery has not been achieved yet. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to develop the first smart dust battery embedded with a low-power monitor, which attains a footprint capacity of more than 10 mAh/cm2 within 1 mm2.

Mots-clés : microbatteries aqueous batteries
Projet ERC : INFORM (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1402678.0 €

Many pivotal decisions hinge on navigating fundamental uncertainty, where a comprehensive description of the relevant contingencies and exact odds remains elusive. This project explores how such uncertainty influences learning, innovation, and strategic information sharing. While previous research has made significant strides in exploring information incentives, it predominantly revolves around scenarios with well-defined risks, neglecting the intricate real-world challenges of rapidly evolving, complex environments. My approach leverages decision-theoretic advances to construct novel theoretical frameworks of active learning and strategic disclosure, shedding light on the implications of fundamental uncertainty on the decision-makers' desire for robustness, demand for commitment, and strategic incentives.  The project entails the study of active experimentation, modeled as a canonical multi-arm bandit problem, in situations where the experimenter's knowledge about the underlying distribution of payoffs is limited. I propose a new theoretical approach centered on regret minimization and continual re-optimization. This work will generate new insights into the experimenter's dynamic tradeoff between exploitation and exploration in the face of shifting worst-case scenarios, as well as the feasibility of ex-ante optimal experimentation rules.  Shifting the focus to strategic interactions, I will investigate how uncertainty over the underlying process of information endowments impacts information-sharing incentives. My work will center on a canonical sender-receiver structure with verifiable information. I will examine the role of the receiver's sophistication in the predictions of such models, in particular, the inevitability of information unraveling. This will challenge some widely accepted insights of this literature.

Mots-clés : microeconomic theory,decisions under uncertainty,regret optimization,experimentation,strategic disclosure
Projet ERC : BorSym (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1488136.0 €

Bordism theory connects many central areas of mathematics: Defined via smooth manifolds, it has proved to have deep connections to formal groups from algebraic geometry and stable homotopy theory from algebraic topology. In particular, complex bordism serves as an effective organizational tool for studying the stable homotopy category, splitting up the homotopy groups of spheres into components of different wavelengths.  The goal of BorSym is to develop a similarly powerful correspondence that classifies the symmetry of spaces through novel connections to equivariant algebraic geometry and smooth actions. While such a relationship for symmetries has long been conjectured, it was only recently that foundational results have been established for the actions of abelian groups, such as the tensor-triangular classification of actions on finite complexes and my proof of the equivariant Quillen theorem. At the same time, bordism of symmetries has become a central object of interest also in the seemingly unrelated field of symplectic topology, where groundbreaking work of Abouzaid and collaborators has identified derived orbifold bordism as the universal target for Floer homology, thereby solving long-standing open problems in the field. In view of these events a new picture is emerging which paints a universal role of equivariant bordism, going substantially beyond even its classical role described above. The goal of BorSym is to unravel the full potential of this emerging picture: to thoroughly develop a chromatic homotopy theory of group actions; to employ the newly established set of tools to tackle major open problems in transformation groups and obtain new information about the derived orbifold bordism ring; and to extend the connections between formal groups, thick subcategories and bordism rings beyond the abelian case.

Mots-clés : cobordism,formal groups,equivariant stable homotopy theory,orbifolds
Projet ERC : WidowsPrint (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Göttingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1470355.0 €

The advent of the printing press spurred crucial intellectual, economic and social developments in early modern Europe. Widows of master printers could also have played a key role in this, especially in the Holy Roman Empire, as it was then home to one of the fastest-growing print industries with a conspicuously high number of women printers. Yet the exact nature of the industry’s growth, and women’s contribution to it, is extremely difficult to reconstruct as a key variable - the print runs of editions - has remained elusive.  WidowsPrint will break significantly new ground by addressing this deficiency. Based on a large array of different archival sources, the project will record systematically all known print runs to create a diverse and representative dataset for early modern Germany. Thus, we can establish which factors determined the size of an edition, survey the total output of individual print shops and highlight gender aspects of book production. In a second step, the project will show how widows pursued economic advantages from powerful institutions (such as universities) and it will analyse how widows' economic agency changed in the 16th and 17th century as book production progressively moved from single workshops to larger family enterprises. Finally, WidowsPrint will use image recognition software to trace the exchange of printing material. This will reveal to what extent widows collaborated with other producers, allowing the professional networks of women printers, hitherto hidden from view, to be reconstructed.  WidowsPrint will radically reappraise the role of widows in the German print industry and analyse how economic developments influenced their rights and their agency. Concurrently, the project will provide a model to estimate the actual size of the output of early modern print shops. This will lead to a substantial change in our understanding of the availability of these important commodities when major transformations were taking place in Europe.

Mots-clés : print growth women book production
Projet ERC : 0-drift (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université Bilkent — Pays : Turquie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BİLKENT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1650000.0 €

Sensor drift is a major problem for inertial sensors and limits their usage in autonomous navigation applications. Inertial sensor data is integrated to find the position and drift leads to error accumulation. A common drift suppression approach is temperature calibration, but ovenized state of the art sensors still exhibit drift. Instead of using temperature as a drift indicator, I have pursued a non-conventional approach and measured on-chip stress that directly correlates with drift. The device interacts with its surroundings through the anchors and on-chip stress accurately estimates drift. I am the leading researcher in the stress compensation field, and I have recently demonstrated that MEMS gyroscope drift could be eliminated with stress compensation. My long-term stability results at 2 days of averaging are unrivaled, but the calibration algorithm is not practical. Different from temperature calibration, stress calibrating a device is difficult. I propose a sensor system that would convert my proof of concept work into a practical 0-drift sensor with self-calibration. The proposed system consists of a circular MEMS sensor with multiple (~100) distributed stress sensors and piezoelectric stress transducers, a machine learning supported analytical calibration model, a custom ASIC for superior noise, and an FPGA for system control and self-calibration. If successful, the proposed approach would improve the MEMS gyroscope stability by >100X to the levels of 10-4 – 10-5°/h, enabling error-free, only gravity-referenced inertial navigation. Unlike GPS or camera, inertial navigation works under all weather, light, and location conditions providing a stable reference to navigation algorithms. With further miniaturization, 0-drift sensors could fit into smartphones, and reliable indoor navigation would become a reality. The compact, low-cost sensor could also disrupt the precision inertial market dominated by bulky and expensive fiber-optic and laser sensors.

Mots-clés : mems,inertial sensors,stress sensing,gyroscope,stress calibration,drift compensation
Projet ERC : FuFri (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Frankfurt School of Finance & Management — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HFB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 766937.5 €

Funding frictions are tensions in financial markets that can preclude institutions from borrowing money or rolling over debt. In extreme situations, such as the 2007-2009 global financial crisis (GFC) or the market turmoil in March 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, funding frictions can lead to the default of otherwise healthy institutions and destabilize the entire financial system. While earlier research (pre-GFC) tends to disregard funding frictions, the enormous risk associated with these market tensions highlights that a deeper understanding of funding frictions is crucial - it can guide policy makers to determine their optimal responses to future crises and help institutions to reduce their funding risk.  In this project, I will investigate how funding frictions affect financing conditions for countries, banks, pension plans, and life insurance companies. While funding frictions can, in the most extreme cases, lead to the bankruptcy of otherwise healthy entities, they usually first manifest through elevated costs for external financing, shorter debt maturities, or a lack of access to certain credit markets. Focusing on these aspects, I will investigate the following question: How did the market developments since the GFC affect funding frictions for countries, banks, pension funds, and insurance companies? More specifically, I examine four post-crisis changes in financial markets - (i) ballooning deficits in most developed economies, (ii) tighter regulation of Money Market Mutual funds, (iii) pension risk transfers with firms transferring their defined benefit (DB) pension plans to life insurance companies, and (iv) tighter bank regulation (as implemented in the Basel III capital accords) - and study their impact on funding costs and access to credit markets. The results can help sovereigns with managing their increasing debt levels and inform policy makers about the (potentially unintended) consequences of regulatory changes.

Mots-clés : financial frictions liquidity risk
Projet ERC : SWEETSWAP (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université de Göteborg — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499926.0 €

Glycosylation is the most common post-translational modification (PTM), decorating two thirds of secreted human proteins. Often dysregulated in disease, the specific attached glycan influences folding and function. Extended glycosylation is supposed to exclusively occur in the secretory pathway. I propose that this model needs to be revised. My preliminary results—both computational and experimental—question this long-standing dogma and hint at a new kind of PTM: extended glycosylation in mammalian nuclei. I propose a research project that exhaustively determines the presence, biosynthesis, transport, and function of extended nuclear glycosylation as a new group of PTMs. This ambitious project will broaden the areas of cell biology that are modulated by glycosylation, launching many new inquiries into disease-relevant functions of glycans, such as gene expression regulation via glycosylation, beyond the known case of O-GlcNAc. I will measure and probe nuclear glycosylation with a broad array of computational and experimental methods, such as subcellular glycoproteomics, glycomics, glyco-CLIP, data mining, AI, genetic engineering, click chemistry, immunostaining, flow cytometry, and CRISPR/Cas9 knockout screens. My approach is structured into three main aims: (i) rigorously cataloguing which nuclear glycan structures are exposed on which proteins in which cell line/species, delineating a nuclear glycome, (ii) elucidating mechanistically how these molecules are biosynthesized and transported into the nucleus, and (iii) probing the functions of these novel PTMs in human cells. Each aim will further the central hypothesis of nuclear glycosylation and has planned experiments to address aspects from biosynthesis to function. Crucially, this research will resolve several curious observations from decades of glycobiology, leading to the rewriting of textbooks, and open up a new field of study with the function of glycans in nuclear processes.

Mots-clés : data science,bioinformatics