Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Interkingdom Signaling between Bacillus subtilis and Sporisorium scitamineum: Exploiting the Ecological Role of Natural Product as Novel Biocontrol Agents (LIPQUORUM)

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: Life Sciences
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 (HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-09-01
End date: 2027-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 217076.16
EU funding (EUR): 217076.16
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Global food security and sustainable agriculture challenges demand innovative crop protection approaches. This project investigates interkingdom signaling between beneficial bacteria (Bacillus subtilis species complex) and a fungal pathogen (Sporisorium scitamineum) causing sugarcane smut disease. While bacterial lipopeptides are known for their antimicrobial properties, their potential as signaling molecules at sub-inhibitory concentrations remains unexplored for basidiomycete plant pathogens. This research aims to unravel how lipopeptides (iturin A, fengycins, and surfactins) impact S. scitamineum's growth, morphology, mating, and virulence in sugarcane. I will characterize lipopeptide effects at various concentrations, investigate their impact on fungal virulence, elucidate underlying molecular mechanisms, and explore their ecological relevance in soil and on plant surfaces. Using advanced techniques like High-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry, RNA-seq, and High-resolution Desorption Electrospray Ionization, I'll reframe traditionally viewed antimicrobial compounds as potential signaling molecules. The project includes greenhouse trials at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, enhancing its translational aspect. This Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action program at Leiden University, supervised by Prof. Ákos T. Kovács, will advance scientific knowledge and provide comprehensive training in research techniques, project management, and science communication. The project's interdisciplinary nature, combining microbiology, biochemistry, and agricultural science, will foster new collaborations and enhance career prospects. By bridging fundamental research with practical applications, this project may revolutionize our understanding of microbial ecology in agricultural systems. The findings could lead to novel, eco-friendly biocontrol strategies, contributing to sustainable agriculture and global food security.

Keywords: bacillus subtilis species complex,sporisorium scitamineum,interkingdom signaling,lipopeptides,iturin a,fengycins,surfactins,quorum sensing,sugarcane smut disease,biocontrol,microbial ecolog
AT THE CORE OF COLONIAL PLANTATIONS: Exploring the Indigenous Roots of the Colonial Sugar Industry in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, 15th-16th C. [Sukkar] (Sukkar)

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: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01, 2023)
Start date: 2025-01-01
End date: 2026-12-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 187624.32
EU funding (EUR): 187624.32
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The European colonisation of the Atlantic brought about land-use change at a continental scale. As colonists invaded new regions, they dispossessed Indigenous populations and took advantage of their farming areas to build cash-cropping plantations. However, pre-colonial fields and their infrastructure had been designed according to different ways of organising production and were ill-suited for commercial agriculture. Thus, settlers were forced to partly accommodate the productive criteria of colonised societies. How the adaptation of Indigenous farming areas took place and how it both made possible and conditioned the development of colonial agriculture in the Atlantic remain unexplored. Sukkar aims to decisively tackle this issue by conducting comparative interdisciplinary research in the Canary Islands and the Dominican Republic. By combining the analysis of archival sources with the study of farming spaces and practices–through field surveying and GIS-based spatial analysis–, I will be able to explore the deep connections that four sixteenth-century Canarian and Dominican sugar plantations have with pre-colonial agriculture. Analysing the design and management of these plantations from a comparative perspective will allow me to identify their Indigenous cores and ascertain how colonial agriculture mutated through its interaction with different systems for organising production. Sukkar will be the first research project on the development of the colonial sugar industry to focus on the contributions made by colonised populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The Action's engagement with local knowledge will also highlight the cultural and ecological value of the agricultural landscapes and traditional practices of rural communities in the Canary Islands and the Dominican Republic and expose the pressing need to protect and nurture them.

Keywords: settler colonialism landscape history agrarian archaeology agricultural change indigenous agriculture cash cropping sugar plantations sugar mills canary islands dominican republic
Controlling frequency-comb fast-gain devices through photonic lattice engineering (LIQUIDLAT)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Systems and Communication Engineering
Panel description: Electrical, electronic, communication, optical and systems engineering
Countries involved: Switzerland
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2025-STG, 2025)
Start date: 2026-01-01
End date: 2030-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1874830.0
EU funding (EUR): 1874830.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Optical Frequency Combs (OFCs), states of light with equally spaced and phase-locked frequencies, revolutionized metrology across a wide range of metrological applications. Current OFC sources are highly accurate but also bulky. Miniaturizing OFC sources to on-chip scale, small enough to be placed in your hand, will enable a second revolution with applications such as distributed pollution tracking, medical detection equipment, compact LIDARs and dense communication channels (DWDM). OFC devices supporting these applications require: (a) in-situ control over the spectrum with power management of ~90% for every spectral line (b) bandwidth of 10-15THz (c) power per line of ~3mW while maintaining wall plug efficiency of >20% In LIQUIDLAT I will develop on-chip OFC devices with (a)-(c), by taking a new approach and leveraging on the recently demonstrated, by me and coauthors, quantum walk comb: generate monolithic lasers with fast gain recovery and apply photonic lattice schemes, both in real and frequency spaces through inter-device coupling and modulation, for controllable, broadband and powerful OFCs. This method is general and can be implemented in other wavelengths. Unlike current on-chip OFC approaches, typically producing pulses, I will use the following elements: (1) fast gain recovery that forces quasi constant intensity and grants the light liquid properties, stabilizing on broadband and stable states (2) direct control over OFC expansion via modulation by radio-frequency sources (3) use topological photonic lattice schemes, both in real and frequency domains, to lock coherently many OFCs to a single powerful output. The study of liquid light dynamics in photonic lattices challenges our understanding of nonlinear dynamics and interaction in semiconductors. The outcome is the development of tools for broadband power-efficient OFC devices that support applications in environmental tracking or efficient data links that reduce the datacentre footprint.
EOSC Beyond: advancing innovation and collaboration for research (EOSC Beyond)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Research infrastructures
Theme: Research infrastructures
Destination: EOSC ecosystem
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Partnership: EOSC (co-programmed)
Countries involved: Netherlands,Greece,Switzerland,Czechia,Spain,Norway,Italy,Finland,Germany,Slovakia,United Kingdom,Serbia,Portugal,Poland,Croatia,North Macedonia,Hungary,Austria
Call: Next generation services for operational and sustainable EOSC Core Infrastructure (HORIZON-INFRA-2023-EOSC-01, 2023)
Start date: 2024-04-01
End date: 2027-03-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 10026324.97
EU funding (EUR): 9999983.9
Participants: 37
Project status: SIGNED

EOSC Beyond overall objective is to advance Open Science and innovation in research in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by providing new EOSC Core capabilities allowing scientific applications to find, compose and access multiple Open Science resources and offer them as integrated capabilities to researchers. To do so, EOSC Beyond supports a new concept of EOSC: a federated and integrated network of Nodes operated at different levels, national, regional, international and thematic, to serve the specific scientific missions of their stakeholders. Further specific objectives of the project are to accelerate ‘time to product’ of new scientific applications with software adapters, enable Open Science with machine composability and dynamic deployment of shared resources, support innovation in EOSC with a testing and integration environment, and align the EOSC Core architecture and specifications to integrate with European dataspaces. The project extends the state of the art of the EOSC Core and adopts a co-design methodology, including requirements elicitation, software development and validation in collaboration with different use cases from EOSC national and regional initiatives (e-Infra CZ, Czechia, NFDI, Germany, and NI4OS, South East Europe region), thematic research infrastructures from Social Sciences and Humanities (CESSDA), Life Sciences (CNB-CSIC and Instruct-ERIC), Environmental Science (ENES and LifeWatch), and Health and Food (METROFood-RI). EOSC Beyond builds on the capacities of prospective EOSC Nodes and partners with multi-annual experience in developing solutions for large-scale federated digital infrastructures and aligns with the technical architecture and requirements of data spaces from different business sectors. Ultimately, EOSC Beyond supports Open Science in modern, data-intensive, and multidisciplinary research, facilitating resource discovery, access, and reuse across scientific communities, organisations, and countries.

Keywords: eosc core,eosc integration suite,eosc interoperability framework,eosc execution framework,eosc exchange,eosc sandbox,eosc platform,eosc nodes,eosc aai federation,use cases,open science
Breaking the Inequality-Crime Cycle: Biases in Police Decisions, 'What Works' in Prison, and Firm Demand for Workers with Criminal Records (POLICE-PRISONS-FIRMS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Panel description: Economics, finance , management
Countries involved: Sweden
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS (ERC-2022-ADG, 2022)
Start date: 2024-01-01
End date: 2028-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2293407.0
EU funding (EUR): 2293407.0
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

Economic inequality across the population implies vastly unequal opportunities in many dimensions that can impact an individual’s chance of entering the justice system. One such channel via which this can occur – even holding criminal behavior constant – is unequal treatment by agents of the justice system (e.g. police). The consequences of such partiality is not trivial: once in the system, it is hard to get out. And to the extent that convictions and sanctions result in worse outcomes (e.g. employment) for offenders and/or family members, the cycle of crime and economic inequality will perpetuate for current and future generations. This program pushes forward the evidence base on three channels (police, prisons, firms) through which this cycle can be broken. Part 1 aims to measure and study the adoption of implicit bias training programs by police agencies. Despite such programs being a go-to response of agencies accused of bias, there is almost no knowledge on how/whether they impact officer behavior. Part 2 addresses the knowledge gap on ‘what (specifically) works’ in prison. First, we will study the unintended impacts of two Swedish sanction reforms onto untreated populations. (i) Does more time in prison have spill-over effects for family members? (ii) Did the introduction of electronic monitoring impact the conditions and outcomes of ineligible offenders left behind in prison? Second, we will open the black-box of prison healthcare to study how in-prison treatment (diagnoses, medication, vaccines, programs) impacts post-release health, medication adherence, and crime. Part 3 aims to further our understanding of the employment opportunities – or lack thereof – for workers with criminal records (WCR). We will use Swedish registers to study (i) the extent to which WCR are sorted across firms and the determinants of a firm’s demand for WCR, (ii) selection of WCR into self-employment, and (iii) how an offender’s social networks impact firm hiring decisions.

Keywords: inequality,discrimination,police,prisons,crime,firms,employment,health,spill overs
Conformational determinants of enzymatic per- and polyfluoroalkyl activation and selectivity (CODE-PFAS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Panel description: Biotechnology using all organisms , biotechnology for environment  and food applications, applied plant and animal sciences , bioengineering and synthetic biology , biomass and biofuels , biohazards
Countries involved: Switzerland
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2025-STG, 2025)
Start date: 2026-04-01
End date: 2031-03-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1500000.5
EU funding (EUR): 1500000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent and pervasive environmental contaminants. Long-chain PFAS bioaccumulate in plants, humans, and wildlife, amplifying their toxicity and health risks, leading to increasing governmental regulations. Shorter-chain PFAS are being phased in by industry to replace longer-chain PFAS, but their toxicity is less known and they are harder to detect, highlighting the need for increased monitoring. The overall situation calls for rapid, accessible, and on-site methods to detect, differentiate, and break down diverse chain-length PFAS. To address this challenge, I propose to investigate ‘fluoro-selectivity’: the capacity of enzymes to differentiate between PFAS of varying chain-lengths and fluorinated versus non-fluorinated compounds. Strikingly, fluoro-selectivity already occurs in enzymes in nature. Here, I propose to use a combination of bioluminescence and machine learning to decipher the fluoro-selectivity code of natural enzymes that undergo conformational changes in response to different PFAS. In tandem, I will establish a new method using a fluoro-selective resistance mechanism to discover environmental enzymes capable of breaking down fluorinated compounds. Finally, I will take advantage of the close structural similarity between firefly luciferases - the enzymes that enable fireflies to glow - and natural PFAS-activating enzymes known as acyl-CoA ligases. Leveraging this evolutionary relationship, I will construct fluoro-selective, bioluminescent enzymes to enable the design of real-time, in situ, and chain length-specific PFAS biosensors. Mapping the first blueprint of enzymatic fluoro-selectivity will enable precision applications in environmental PFAS monitoring and remediation. More fundamentally, this work aims to reveal the underlying biochemical and evolutionary drivers of fluoro-selectivity from bacteria to fireflies, uncovering paths for the emergence of metabolic traits across the tree of life.

Keywords: per and polyfluoroalkyl substances pfas enzyme specificity firefly luciferase coenzyme a ligase biotransformation biosensor ion exporter metagenomic library protein engineering wastewater microbiome
Artificial intelligence enabled electrospinning approach to fight pulmonary cancer (RESPIRE)

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: Information Science and Engineering
Countries involved: Italy,United States
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 (HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01, 2024)
Start date: 2026-09-01
End date: 2030-02-28
Duration (months): 42.0
Total project cost (EUR): 445401.9
EU funding (EUR): 445401.9
Participants: 4
Project status: SIGNED

Pulmonary cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Surgery is associated with high morbidity and operative mortality. One of the main causes of the poor survival rate is cancer relapse at the surgical resection margins. Thus, developing a strategy to minimize the local recurrence rate of lung cancer efficiently is greatly needed. Nanotechnology-assisted approaches, such as nanoparticles (NPs) and nanofibers (NFs) obtained via electrospinning could enable novel strategies to fabricate better performing implantable devices, including localized drug delivery systems. Many working parameters affect the final outcomes in electrospinning and different fibrous architectures can be generated, much is still to be understood to precisely control, and ultimately predict the mechanical, physico-chemical, and bioactive properties of the resulting meshes, which are essential in pulmonary tissues. The Postdoctoral Fellowship Researcher (PFR) has studied biodegradable fibers as drug delivery systems in her Ph.D. and Post Doc and herein aims to develop a biodegradable nanofibrous patch based on elastin (i.e., the native component of the pulmonary tissues) containing chemotherapeutics via electrospinning/electrospray. To achieve this ambitious goal, the PFR needs to learn multiscale materials design and artificial intelligence to precisely match the mechanical properties of lung tissue, which will be addressed during the outgoing phase at MIT. PFR will also investigate the encapsulation of chemotherapy and immunotherapy inside electrosprayed NPs, will model release mechanisms at MIT and will analyze drug release effectiveness in an in vitro model at UTRGV (i.e., secondment) to be used for a biologic assessment in the returning phase at the UNIPI. The multidisciplinary approach (engineering, biology, materials and medical sciences), will accelerate the development of innovative clinically oriented prototypes and will contribute to the ER’s scientific and personal.

Keywords: lung cancer,electrospinning,nanoparticle,drug delivery,silk,elastin,computational modeling,machine learning
Black hole dynamics and the origin of supermassive black holes (SEEDS)

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: Physics
Countries involved: Ireland,Italy
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2022 (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01, 2022)
Start date: 2024-06-01
End date: 2026-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 215534.4
EU funding (EUR): 215534.4
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Every massive galaxy in the Universe contains a supermassive black hole in the center, which has grown from a smaller black hole, a so called seed black hole. Galaxies must have acquired their seed black holes in the early Universe, to allow for the observed long coevolution between black holes and galaxies, but recent research has shown that the dynamics of seed black holes in early galaxies are complex, and that seed black holes struggle to find their way to the center of future host galaxies. For this project, I propose the first large-scale study of seed black hole dynamics in the early Universe. I will use my extensive expertise in numerical simulations to design a high-resolution simulation able to fully resolves seed black hole trajectories. From this simulation, I will create the first large-scale catalogue of high-redshift black hole seed dynamics for different black hole formation models. I will use this unique dataset to understand galaxy seeding, determine the relative importance of different seed formation mechanisms and make observational predictions for the James-Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). These upcoming major observational campaigns will soon provide an unprecedented wealth of observational data on black holes and their host galaxies in the early Universe, making the proposed project extremely timely. With this work, I will challenge the standard paradigm of rapid seed black hole delivery, and lead the way towards a paradigm shift in our understanding of the origin of supermassive black holes.

Keywords: supermassive black holes,early universe,dynamics,simulations