Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Pioneering a lighter future for automotive & aerospace (CPA-PLFAA)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Accelerator
Destination: Other destinations
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Ireland
Call: EIC Accelerator 2024 - Short application (HORIZON-EIC-2024-ACCELERATOR-01, 2024)
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1980000.0
EU funding (EUR): 1980000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Lightweighting, a key goal in the aerospace and automotive sector, aims to produce multi-material lightweight craft/vehicles without compromising safety and durability. Surface preparation is essential for achieving the multi-material interfaces, achieving optimal bonding and bond strength - critical factors for efficiency, performance, or safety. High-precision and quality surface preparation is crucial for applying coatings, adhesives and joining/bonding materials like carbon fibre, aluminium, or polymer composites. However, current solutions for surface preparation and bonding of multi-material surfaces are inadequate, increasingly outdated as they generate waste, but are prone to human error or contamination, and often fail to meet quality standards. Effective surface preparation is critical for many reasons, in addition to those outlined above, surface preparation should enable the removal of contaminants (not create more), enhance bonding durability, scalability/compatibility and integrate into the quality control and process monitoring frameworks to meet regulatory compliances. Plasma Bound's Controlled Polymer Ablation (CPA) addresses these bonding challenges for similar and dissimilar joining (i.e. multi-material joining), including hybrid joining of composites. CPA employs atmospheric pressure plasma to ablate the top layer of polymer from a composite substrate, exposing the fibres without damage in a single step – and is fully automatable using robotic solutions. CPA allows adhesives to contact a highly energised fresh surface without contaminants, facilitating chemical bonding while enhancing bond quality and integrity, while enabling superior bonding performance. CPA treatments ensure high-quality surface preparations are achieved time and time again, repeatably, while also opening doors to a more scalable and commercially viable business case for wider integration of lightweight composite materials into the automotive and aerospace design processes.

Keywords: aerospace,automotive,lightweight enabling,controlled polymer ablation,composites,surface preparation,manufacturing,bonding
All-around encapsulated Xene membranes for integration in transistors (XMem)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Proof of concept grants
Action type: ERC actions
Countries involved: Italy
Call: ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS1 (ERC-2022-POC1, 2022)
Start date: 2022-06-01
End date: 2023-11-30
Duration (months): 18.0
Total project cost (EUR): 164571.43
EU funding (EUR): 150000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Silicon is the key building block of transistors, the workhorse of modern electronics. Since the early 2000s, scaling down the transistors’ size according to Moore’s Law to increase clock speed, decrease energy requirements and enhance compactness has been progressively more challenging than it had been for the previous 40 years. Reducing silicon at the two-dimensional level is a technological vision to achieve the ultimate shrinking of high-performance electronic devices and gain enough mechanical flexibility to make it integrable in low-power flexible devices. We propose to attain this breakthrough result by stabilizing silicene, an atomically thin silicon layer with a nearly graphene-like structure, by physically protecting both of its faces. Our goal is the scalable production of durable silicene in the form of atomically thin membranes. Standardized production of silicene membranes will be then assessed for integration into high-performance or low-power and flexible transistors with unprecedented outperforming technical advantages (intrinsic channel miniaturization, high carrier mobility, high energy efficiency, large-scale uniformity, high flexibility, and transfer compatibility with secondary substrates) and substantial reduction of the energy consumption. These characteristics make silicene membranes a promising component of a sustainable electronics for massive diffused societal trends like the internet-of-things. The goal of this PoC project is to validate with industrial players the technological feasibility of a prototypal silicene-based transistor, at the same time defining the best IP protection and commercialization route.
Pliocene Hominin Dispersal to southern Africa: Choice or Chance? (PLIODIS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The Study of the Human Past
Panel description: Archaeology and history
Countries involved: South Africa,Belgium,France
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS (ERC-2023-ADG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-08-01
End date: 2030-08-31
Duration (months): 73.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2499248.0
EU funding (EUR): 2499248.0
Participants: 4
Project status: SIGNED

Modern humans are unique in their ability to adapt to, and to thrive in, different environments. This trait facilitated their dispersal out-of-Africa to higher latitudes, i.e. to temperate and seasonal habitats, during the Pleistocene. However, there are Plio-Pleistocene hominins at higher latitudes in South Africa (SA) from ~3.7Ma onwards. Did human behavioural/physiological flexibility evolve early in our evolutionary history? Alternatively, did Pliocene hominins occupy such temperate zones due to different palaeoclimatic conditions in deep time and/or due to stochastic events? To untangle these questions this project will: (1) determine the geomorphological and palaeoecological changes in the Kalahari/proto-Limpopo basin, (2) create dynamic palaeo-precipitation/-vegetation models from various archives, (3) carry out detailed anatomical, functional and morphometric analyses of the hominin fossil record and (4) combine the datasets to appraise species diversity (functional adaptations), geneflow (hybridization) and dispersal scenarios (palaeobiogeography). 3 key working hypotheses underlie the proposal: 1. >2.6Ma East African (EA) hominin ranges expanded/contracted in accord with wet and dry phases; periodically, the southernmost populations became reproductively isolated. Early SA hominins represent descendants of Australopithecus anamensis and Australopithecus afarensis, respectively. 2. ~2.6-1.5Ma With the onset of the Northern Hemisphere Glaciation and the re-organisation of the drainage pattern within the Kalahari basin, dispersal corridors repeatedly closed (vicariance) and opened, resulting in intermittent levels of gene flow (i.e. hybridization) between EA and SA hominins. 3. <~1.5Ma Tectonic and hydrographic changes led to the Zambezi River becoming a powerful barrier during the Pleistocene. SA hominins younger than 1.5Ma are likely the result of endemism; competitive exclusion amongst these hominins resulted in exploitation of distinct ecological niches

Keywords: palaeoanthropology hominin palaeobiology plio pleistocene hominins south african hominins hominin functional anatomy hominin diversification palaeoscience homo
The Upcycled Clinic: A global ethnography of material creativity in contemporary medicine (MAKE DO MEDICINE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Panel description: Sociology, social psychology, education  sciences , communication  studies
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2023-COG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-05-01
End date: 2029-06-30
Duration (months): 62.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1999865.0
EU funding (EUR): 1999865.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

As the world wades through Covid-19 pandemic debris, it becomes harder to ignore that medicine is a distinctly wasteful enterprise. Hospitals in particular have become nodes of disposability. Solutions to this problem has to date attracted mostly the attention of medical technology companies promoting circular economies, a model still reliant on production and technological innovation. The Upcycled Clinic takes a different direction. This ethnographic project focuses on creative practices such as repurposing in the clinic, involving making the most of existing materials. Five sub-projects have been carefully selected with illuminating examples around the world including Antarctica, Ghana, the Netherlands, the U.S and U.K. A team of ethnographers will conduct fieldwork and interviews with a range of actors, many often overlooked, such as cleaners and laundry staff, and look at open datasets of pandemic improvisations. The overarching objective is, through comparison, to better understand conditions which cultivate and curtail creative material engagement in the clinic. This inventive and timely contribution to the social study of medicine will advance the field in at least three directions. First, by attending more closely to materials, it moves hospital ethnographies beyond current focus on the patient encounter. Second, it will offer the first globally orientated study of improvisation in the clinic. Third, it breaks new methodological ground in the social sciences by developing novel ways of reusing and sharing research material in ethnography that adopts sensory methods and rethinks data waste. These contributions from the rich case of the clinic will add empirical insights to theories of materiality and help address long standing questions regarding resilience and innovation in the workplace. Practically, the study will articulate conditions under which healthcare can leverage creativity and pay better attention to local solutions to wastefulness and shortage.

Keywords: team ethnography,hospital ethnography,anthropology of medicine,making,materiality,senses,sensory ethnography,creative methods,upcycling
Molecular Engineering of Synthetic Motile Systems towards Biological Environments (SynMoBio)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Panel description: New materials and new synthetic approaches, structure -properties relations, solid state chemistry, molecular architecture, organic chemistry
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2021-COG, 2021)
Start date: 2022-09-01
End date: 2027-08-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2350000.0
EU funding (EUR): 2350000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

The goal of this ERC is to develop synthetic motile systems with cilia-like and flagella-like movement based on supramolecular assemblies of controlled shape, size and morphology. With this strategy, we are addressing the great challenge of developing synthetic systems with the ability to move, sense, adapt at the cellular, tissue and systemic level. The systems developed will then allow us to study the effect of propulsive movement on cellular uptake, targeted transport, external guidance and sensing and thus define the active delivery potential of these systems. Assembly from building blocks with pre-programmed functionality able to transfer complexity to their structure and behaviour is the core principle guiding nature and a tool that we have harnessed in our research. Besides their ability to move directionally these complex bio-inspired systems are programmed to sense changes in the environment and consequently to adapt to the changes by regulating their speed, shape and behaviour. Since they are by design catalytically active, they can also change the chemical composition of their environment as well as dynamically regulate the chemical signaling pathways in their interaction with other species. The study of the primary biomimetic complex emergent functions such as motility, adaptivity (regulated and feedback output) and interaction/communication in biological environments will be the goals of this ERC program and will concentrate on 3 work packages built from 5 interconnecting projects. Organic, inorganic catalysts and biocatalysts based on multiple enzymes will be incorporated within asymmetric soft self-assembled structures to generate smart autonomous systems able to harvest different sources of energy from the surrounding environment and generate a feedback response. The final output of the program will be to develop an understanding of the directional movement of engineered synthetic motile systems studied from cellular levels to complex environments.

Keywords: bionanotechnology,nanochemistry,amphiphilic polymers,dendrimers,micro nanogel,autonomous systems,motility,life like molecular systems,molecular intelligence,adaptive systems,communication,chemotaxis,collective behaviour
Propagation of cellular memory through dormancy (DOR CODE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Panel description: For all organisms : Structure and function of the cell, cell -cell communication, embryogenesis, tissue differentiation, organogenesis, growth, development, evolution of development, organoids, stem cells, regeneration, therapeutic approaches
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2023-STG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-01-01
End date: 2028-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1488750.0
EU funding (EUR): 1488750.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Decades of work established the importance of dormant cells in reproduction and regeneration, however, a central unsolved question is how the cell propagates transcriptional memory and cellular identity through dormancy. Current approaches tend to characterize dormancy as a binary on-off switch. In contrast, a highly coordinated and precisely timed set of events are needed to successfully transition cells into dormancy, to maintain dormancy, and to exit it. In DOR-CODE, I will leverage the latest gene editing and genome profiling tools on an inducible and reversible embryonic dormancy model that I spearheaded (Bulut-Karslioglu et al, 2016, van der Weijden et al, 2022) to discover the genomic basis of dormancy. My mission is to reveal the temporal regulatory code of dormancy - ‘DOR-CODE’ - without which cellular identity cannot be propagated through time. Recent work by us and others has started to reveal the epigenomic landscape of dormancy: a highly repressed state with elevated DNA and histone methylation and decreased transcriptional output. Cellular strategies to counteract this overall repressive state at regulatory sites at the correct times are key for the retention of developmental potential. Here, I will identify DNA and histone demethylation strategies to propagate transcriptional memory at key regulatory elements (Objectives 1&2) and connect locus-specific regulation (Objectives 1&2) to genome macro-organization (Objective 3). By building direct links between anabolic growth and genome regulation, I will demonstrate how timely gene reactivation is ensured to enable exit from dormancy. The conceptual leap and mechanistic insights resulting from DOR-CODE will (1) enhance our knowledge of embryonic dormancy and lay the foundation for better in vitro embryo preservation, (2) bring a fresh perspective to related systems such as regeneration, longevity, and cancer dormancy, and (3) fuel the research in my lab for decades to come.

Keywords: dormancy
It's about time: Towards a dynamic account of natural vision. (TIME)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Panel description: Cognitive science, psychology, linguistics
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2021-STG, 2021)
Start date: 2022-07-01
End date: 2027-06-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499455.0
EU funding (EUR): 1499455.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

The visual world around us is a source of rich semantic information that guides our higher-level cognitive processes and actions. To tap into this resource, the brain?s visual system engages in complex, intertwined computations to actively sample, extract, and integrate information across space and time. Surprisingly however, the integrative nature of vision hardly plays a role in the way we approach it in experimentation and computational modelling. Instead, higher-level vision is commonly treated as a largely bottom-up categorization process. TIME proposes a new approach. It will allow us to study vision in a more natural setting and as a process that is (a) geared towards semantic understanding instead of label-based categorisation, (b) naturally intertwined with active information sampling and (c) expanding across multiple timeframes, including network dynamics that unfold within and across eye fixations. This will be accomplished by an ambitious, three-step work program that combines cutting-edge non-invasive human brain imaging performed while participants visually explore tens of thousands of rich human-annotated natural scenes, the development of novel multivariate analysis techniques, and large-scale computational modelling using a new bio-inspired deep learning framework for active vision that closes the sensory-motor loop. Using this interdisciplinary approach, TIME will establish, for the first time, when, where, and how visual semantic understanding emerges in the brain as it actively samples and integrates information from the world in a continuously updating and dynamic decision process. These ground-breaking developments both in experimentation and deep neural network modelling build towards a fundamental paradigm shift in how we study, model, and understand vision, yielding new insights into its complex neural processes operating in more natural, ecologically valid conditions, as well as a closer alignment between biological and synthetic vision.

Keywords: human vision,visual system,eye movements,recurrence,dynamics,semantics,computational modelling,deep learning,deep reinforcement learning,machine learning,neuroscience
Light Emitting Silicon Germanium (Bright Chips)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Synergy grants
Action type: ERC actions
Countries involved: Netherlands,Germany
Call: ERC SYNERGY GRANTS (ERC-2024-SyG, 2024)
Start date: 2025-04-01
End date: 2031-03-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 13999317.0
EU funding (EUR): 13999317.0
Participants: 3
Project status: SIGNED

Our vision is to revolutionize information and quantum technologies by blending photonic and electronic functionality onto a single chip. This long-standing challenge has remained unattainable because chips, fabricated by mainstream silicon technology, cannot emit light. Computer chips would be much faster and consume far less energy if they would operate with light. In addition, optical functionality will be transformative for quantum computation since silicon technologies are by far the most scalable allowing the connection of millions of quantum bits using light. We envision to realize light-emitting chips by changing the most fundamental property of a given material – the way in which the atoms are arranged in space. Hereby, we explore a novel material, hexagonal SiGe, with an atomic arrangement that differs from the natural cubic material, rendering it optically active. We will understand light emission mechanisms in the classical and quantum regimes, when many, few and even single photons are generated on demand. Moreover, we will elucidate the optical and electrical properties of quantum structures, aiming for landmark experiments, each of which can open a new research field: i) a SiGe-based laser, which demonstrates the photonic potential of the material, and is a device directly relevant for optical communication on a chip, ii) a SiGe quantum light source, which uniquely combines the stability of the quantum state with optical functionality and iii) spin quantum bits that can be rapidly manipulated, upscaled and are long-lived due to the expected material properties. In the ultimate experiments, we connect the advantageous opto-electronic properties of this new material system and investigate i) active photonic circuits in which light is switched by light, and ii) the transduction of a static electronic quantum state (spin) into a propagating photonic state to connect distant qubits.

Keywords: crystal growth,nanolaser,quantum photonics,silicon quantum electronics,spin qubit
Rainbow partitions and oriented structures in random graphs (PARTIORI)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Postdoctoral Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Mathematics
Countries involved: Spain,United Kingdom
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 (HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-09-15
End date: 2027-09-14
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 209914.56
EU funding (EUR): 209914.56
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

Combinatorial designs are some of the most fascinating and elusive objects in mathematics. For over 200 years their study has generated many sophisticated methods, and the theory has found applications in biological experiment design, construction of strong error correcting codes, and network fault detection. The celebrated proof of the existence of designs has been an impressive achievement of the last decade. At the core of this landmark result lies a combination of powerful contemporary tools: the semi-random and absorption methods. The PARTIORI project seeks to utilise and extend these ideas to demonstrate the existence of certain transversal partitions and large oriented structures of, respectively, coloured an oriented random graphs. At the intersection of combinatorial design theory, Ramsey theory, and probabilistic combinatorics, PARTIORI lies at the edge of active sub-areas, exploring rainbow decompositions of edge-coloured random graphs and thresholds for the emergence of an Ramsey property of graph orientations. More precisely, the project aims at leveraging powerful methods from extremal and probabilistic combinatorics (the semi-random, absorption, regularity and container methods) to make significant contributions to the following two areas: - obtaining decompositions of edge-coloured complete graphs into few rainbow paths; - establishing universality results for the containment of oriented structures in arbitrary orientations of random graphs. The research is planned for two years and takes as a basis prior results obtained by the applicant while also taking advantage of approaches developed by the host. A secondment at the University of Warwick (U.K.) is also planned, hosted by Prof. Richard Montgomery, a leading figure in mathematics and expert in both topics covered by the project.

Keywords: probabilistic combinatorics,random discrete structures,combinatorial design theory,extremal combinatorics,ramsey theory,directed graphs,randomized algorithms