Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Damage Controlled Composite Materials (DACOMAT)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Nanotechnologies, Advanced Materials, Advanced Manufacturing and Processing, and Biotechnology
Theme: Advanced materials
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Spain,Spain,Norway,Norway,Belgium,Norway,Norway,France,France,Netherlands,Denmark,United Kingdom,Denmark,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call: Improved material durability in buildings and infrastructures, including offshore (H2020-NMBP-2017-two-stage, 2017)
Start date: 2018-01-01
End date: 2022-10-31
Duration (months): 58.0
Total project cost (EUR): 5873915.0
EU funding (EUR): 5873915.0
Participants: 21
Project status: SIGNED

Society is dependent upon the continuous functioning of critical infrastructures such as road bridges and energy supply. These infrastructures are exposed to high loads and harsh environmental conditions through their lifetime in operation and materials failures lead to down time having vast negative effects on productivity and well-being in society in terms of lost time, shortened life cycles and increased service costs. So engineers face the challenge to develop durable materials compatible with industrial standards in an economically viable way. Composites represent attractive materials and are increasingly used for such applications since they demonstrate low weight, high strength and stiffness and high environmental resistance. However composites suffer from sudden brittle failure mainly due to production defects and handling damages; this is currently handled by strict quality and process control from manufacturers, resulting in high production costs which can represent a barrier to introduction and development of composites in a wide range of applications. The general objective of DACOMAT is to develop more damage tolerant and damage predictable low cost composite materials in particular aimed for used in large load carrying constructions like bridges, buildings, wind-turbine blades and off shore structures. The developed materials and condition monitoring solutions will enable composite structures to be designed and manufactured as large parts allowing for more and larger manufacturing defects and the need for manual inspection to be dramatically reduced. A demonstration of the materials’ performances in relevant environment will be conducted in two business cases: wind turbine blades and road bridge beams, while both LCC and LCA analysis will also strengthen the project’s credibility.The project gathers the full industrial value chain: ranging from materials development and manufacturing to composite parts demonstrators and standardisation.

Keywords: composites,bridges,wind turbine blades,marine structures
Selective Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer (EVOLHGT)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Panel description: Ecology, biodiversity, environmental change, evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology, microbial ecology, marine biology, ecophysiology, theoretical developments and modelling
Countries involved: Austria,United Kingdom
Call: ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2014-CoG, 2014)
Start date: 2015-06-01
End date: 2020-05-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1820865.0
EU funding (EUR): 1515740.95
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a form of genic inheritance that occurs between individuals in a population or between species rather than from parent to offspring. HGT is most prevalent in bacteria, where it is an important source of novel metabolic pathways, pathogenicity factors, and antibiotic resistance. In spite of the importance of HGT, we understand little about the evolutionary barriers to HGT. This proposal will outline a systematic experimental approach to elucidate factors that select for or against horizontally transferred genes, by pursuing three objectives. The first is to quantify intrinsic selection acting on newly transferred genes, by experimentally transferring and expressing several hundred genes across species boundaries. We will be able to systematically classify genes as resistant or permissive to transfer, examine the effect of the function and position in metabolic and regulatory networks on resistance to transfer, as well as identify any genes with substantial intrinsic benefits. The second objective is to examine the effect of evolutionary divergence on HGT, by determining whether genes from closely related species are more permissive to transfer than those from more divergent species. The final objective is to determine the role of the environment in shaping these selective effects. Understanding how robust the selective effects are to different environmental conditions will aid in evaluating the relative roles of genetics and the environment as factors in the evolutionary outcomes of HGT . Overall, this work will provide a systematic analysis of the roles of different factors in affecting the outcomes of horizontal gene transfer. Understanding this process in a quantitative fashion is critical to understanding bacterial adaptation and diversity.

Keywords: horizontal gene transfer,distribution of mutational effects
Being a politically active emigrant. The political structuring of the French and Italians abroad: a comparative analysis of mobile citizens (POLEMIG)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Career Restart panel
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Belgium
Call: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF) (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015, 2015)
Start date: 2017-09-01
End date: 2019-09-12
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 172800.0
EU funding (EUR): 172800.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This research project aims to understand the organizational and cognitive consequences of the election of specific national political representatives by citizens living abroad. The proposal is based on a comparative analysis of two expatriate populations with such rights, Italians and French, in two host countries, Belgium and Canada. The focus of the research is the motivations, representations and strategies of politically active emigrants in branches of home political parties abroad. The research will be done through an original multi-methods research design – computer-assisted discourse analysis, qualitative comparative analysis and quantitative questionnaire analysis – to gather rich and sociologically relevant data. The combination of CAQDAS techniques with QCA, as a comparative tool of analysis, will produce robust results and provide good grounds for tentative generalization beyond the considered case studies. The project will originally contribute to the theoretical advancement of many research fields. It will develop the theory of political parties, since the knowledge is weak and fragmentary concerning the role and functioning of political parties abroad, and almost inexistent in non-contentious contexts. The project will also advance the theory of transnational politics, since it will focus on two dimensions underdeveloped in the existing literature: the involvement of emigrants in home politics and the analysis of banal transnational politics. The project will finally contribute to the theory of national identity and citizenship since it will question the reconfiguration of established nation states that might result from giving citizenship rights and representation to nationals living abroad. In a policy perspective the research responds to recurring demands to further investigate the governance of migration as well as the implications of multilevel citizenship in a context of growing mobility of EU citizens from, to and within the EU.

Keywords: political party,emigration,nationality,citizenship,transnationalism,democracy,activism,discourse analysis,political sociology,comparative sociology,france,italy,belgium,canada
How do you spell RESEARCH? SOCIETY - Science, histOry, Culture, musIc, Environment, arT, technologY (SOCIETY)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: European researchers' Night
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Countries involved: Italy,Italy
Call: European Researchers' Night (H2020-MSCA-NIGHT-2018, 2018)
Start date: 2018-05-01
End date: 2019-12-31
Duration (months): 20.0
Total project cost (EUR): 295327.5
EU funding (EUR): 295327.5
Participants: 7
Project status: CLOSED

European Researchers' Night (ERN) events promoted by the SOCIETY Consortium will take place in 5 cities (Bologna, Forlì, Cesena, Ravenna and Rimini), with a program extended to both 2018 and 2019, for a total project duration of 18 months. SOCIETY aims to present research as the best tool to sort out the Societal Challenges that human beings face. SOCIETY will rely on interactivity and engagement at large: the project will aim to produce a Night co-design approach, in which researchers together with society will conceive the event programme. After the success of the previous ERN edition, the Consortium comes with a new proposal, inspired by the EU Year of Cultural Heritage. This is reflected by the new concept pointed out in the new title and acronym, where SOCIETY now stands for words that can be used to define our cultural heritage: Science, histOry, Culture, musIc, Environment, arT, technologY. The proposal stands at the intersection between these concepts. We’ll try to identify the features that shape and define our perception of ourselves and how we perceive who lives near and far from us. What is it that defines our culture? How and when is it that what we know, what we do, where we are, how we speak and move, and eat, and wear become culture? And finally, can our cultural heritage help us look ahead, understand the present, and to imagine the future? ERN events will explore the many ways in which research may help us understand, sustain, preserve, and develop our cultural heritage, in all its various shades and declinations.They will be designed in order to attract different kinds of publics. However, secondary school students, who are about to make their choice in terms of career, will be a privileged target, also through the involvement of Eu and MSCA researchers. Specific effort will be devoted to involve female young researchers and students in the activities, to stress that research needs increasing contribution from women to reach its goals.

Keywords: public engagement,event,dissemination,co design,cultural heritage,schools,young people,edutainment,gender balance
The Materials Genome in Action (MaGic)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Products and processes engineering
Panel description: Product and process design, chemical, civil, environmental, mechanical, vehicle engineering, energy processes and relevant computational methods
Countries involved: Switzerland
Call: ERC Advanced Grant (ERC-2014-ADG, 2014)
Start date: 2015-11-01
End date: 2021-04-30
Duration (months): 66.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2486720.0
EU funding (EUR): 2486720.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

It is now possible to make an enormous spectrum of different, novel nanoporous materials simply by changing the building blocks in the synthesis of Metal Organic Frameworks (MOF) or related materials. This unique chemical tunability allows us to tailor-make materials that are optimal for a given application. The promise of finding just the right material seems remote however: because of practical limitations we can only ever synthesize, characterize, and test a tiny fraction of all possible materials. To take full advantage of this development, therefore, we need to develop alternative techniques, collectively referred to as Materials Genomics, to rapidly screen large numbers of materials and obtain fundamental insights into the chemical nature of the ideal material for a given application. The PI will tackle the challenge and promise posed by this unprecedented chemical tunability through the development of a multi-scale computational approach, which aims to reliably predict the performance of novel materials before synthesis. We will develop methodologies to generate libraries of representative sets of synthesizable hypothetical materials and perform large-scale screening of these libraries. These studies should give us fundamental insights into the common molecular features of the top-performing materials. The methods developed will be combined into an open access infrastructure in which our hypothetical materials are publicly accessible for data mining and big-data analysis. The project is organized in three Work Packages, each centered around finding better materials for carbon capture: (1) screen materials for gas separations and develop the tools to predict the best materials for carbon capture; (2) gain insights into and develop a computational methodology for screening the mechanical properties of nanoporous materials; (3) achieve an understanding of the amine-CO2 chemistry in diamine-appended MOFs and use this to predict their performance.

Keywords: carbon capture,materials genome,molecular simulaiton
Deconstruction of a neural circuit for working memory: hubs, coding mechanisms, and signal routing (MEMCIRCUIT)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Panel description: Nervous system development, homeostasis and ageing, nervous system function and dysfunction, systems neuroscience and modelling, biological basis of cognitive processes and of behaviour, neurological and mental disorders
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2017-STG, 2017)
Start date: 2018-02-01
End date: 2024-01-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499989.0
EU funding (EUR): 1499989.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Working memory is the basis of cognition. It allows behaviour to be governed by internal goals rather than by reflexive stimulus-response mappings. The neural mechanisms of memory maintenance are heavily contested. Animal electrophysiology studies suggest a pivotal role of persistent spiking activity in single neurons of the prefrontal cortex, whereas human neuroimaging points to sub-threshold synaptic activity distributed across sensory cortex. This double dissociation of storage mechanisms and storage sites could result from the comparison of different recording methods, which measure distinct neuronal signals. Alternatively, there might be a fundamental difference between humans and animals. My key objective is to formulate general principles of working memory coding at the cellular and circuit level by integrating across previously disconnected lines of research. I will address two central questions. First, where and how is the memorized information stored? I will use an innovative approach to record large-scale single-unit activity from a cognitive (prefrontal) and a sensory (auditory) region in awake neurosurgical patients and directly compare the data to recordings from mice performing the same auditory working memory task. This will allow me to determine whether the mnemonic fingerprints are species-specific or shared across humans and rodents. Second, what neural pathways support the flow of information during working memory? Using the animal model, I will disrupt cross-regional interactions in the memory network with millisecond-precise, projection-specific optogenetic tools in order to dissect the contribution of each hub to memory storage and memory access. This project provides an unprecedented one-to-one matching of behavioural tasks and recording methods with single-cell and split-second resolution in humans and rodents. It represents a major step forward in understanding the cellular and circuit basis of a critical cognitive brain function.

Keywords: human single unit recordings,working memory,prefrontal cortex
The smartest non-energy aeration system for water cleaning facilities (OxTube)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine and maritime and inland water research and the bioeconomy
Theme: Cross-cutting marine and maritime research
Action type: SME instrument
Countries involved: Finland
Call: Supporting SMEs efforts for the development - deployment and market replication of innovative solutions for blue growth (H2020-SMEINST-1-2016-2017, 2017)
Start date: 2017-12-01
End date: 2018-01-31
Duration (months): 2.0
Total project cost (EUR): 71429.0
EU funding (EUR): 50000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The OxTube is the smartest device when it comes to dissolving oxygen and other gases into water or liquids. One of the most important stages in the water cleaning systems, specifically in potable water treatment (PWT) facilities, is the aeration systems. This process consists in the use of oxygen from the air to generate a kinetic diffusion into the raw water, where oxygen moves from the air to the water, oxidizing, and boosting the growth of micro-organisms which absorb, process and deactivate dissolved chemicals and foreign matter. Water oxidation also allows to separate iron, metals and other different particles from the water. The current air injection technologies used in PWT plants to oxygenate water incur in high energy costs, due to the high electric consumption of the air pumping equipment. Air injection systems consume about 50% of total electricity used in PWT facilities . We estimate that electricity costs of aeration at a European municipal PWT facility for a community of 200,000 people amount to around €204 K annually. Thanks to SANSOX technology, forced pumping air is not necessary. Instead of this, effortless 100% oxygen saturation (efficiency) is achieved by kinetic diffusion (movement of molecules or atoms from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration, produced for the kinetic energy of these particles), without electricity consumptions, saving up to 50% of total PWT costs. Clean water with natural balance of gases and minerals plays the central role in the quality of life of people, their health and contributes for higher life expectancy. Growing urban areas with constantly increasing density of population directly contribute to climate changes via waste water discharge and water treatment activities. OxTube contributes to the solution of those challenges via wiser use of energy, materials, space by handling water-gas mixing and separation processes in the most effective way.

Keywords: water treatment,waste water,fish farms,energy consumption
Understanding the material structure-activity correlation in plasma catalytic CO2 conversion (PLASMACAT)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Standard European Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Chemistry
Countries involved: Belgium
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018, 2018)
Start date: 2019-04-01
End date: 2021-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 178320.0
EU funding (EUR): 178320.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Plasma catalysis is a new emerging field of conversion technology, particularly focused on converting relatively stable gases such as CO2 to basic chemical building blocks by using electrical energy. It consist of highly energetic accelerated electrons producing a cocktail of activated species such as ions, radicals and excited species. To be able to enhance its energy efficiency and create selective conversions, packing materials and catalysts are being introduced in the plasma. Although it is well accepted that there is a mutual interaction of the materials on the plasma properties and vice versa, the underlying mechanisms and even more the specific material properties influencing plasma conversion, selectivity and energy efficiency are still largely unknown. Therefore, a systematic study applying know-how of the applicant and supervisor in controlled material synthesis will be integrated in plasma catalytic studies, a new field of research for the applicant. This will permit a systematic structure-activity correlation, identifying the impact of yet unrevealed material properties on the plasma characteristics and performance (conversion, selectivity and energy efficiency) determined by the specific plasma environment. Focus will be put on studying the impact of metal dispersion and metal support interactions on the plasma characteristics, plasma catalytic conversion and selectivity as well as its stability. Elucidating the role of packing geometry on plasma catalysis is a particular aspect of this MSCA, which is expected to have unique behavior in plasma discharge and characteristics and hence conversion and selectivity. This is a feature distinctive for plasma and not encountered in classical catalytic processes.

Keywords: plasma catalysis,structure activity correlation,material plasma interaction,plasma material interaction,catalyst shaping
Revealing mechanisms of plant-soil feedback in search of trait indicators (PLECTRA)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Standard European Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Environment and Geosciences
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018, 2018)
Start date: 2020-09-01
End date: 2024-08-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 187572.48
EU funding (EUR): 187572.48
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

It is increasingly recognized that plant-soil feedbacks influence the composition and functioning of natural communities and ecosystems. However, our capacity to predict the outcome of such above-belowground interactions is still hampered by poor generalization capacity. As plant traits have been used to explain patterns in both plant and soil communities, they could provide a useful approach for explaining and predicting plant-soil feedback. Here, I will use the recent advances made in plant trait research, which have greatly increased our capacity to predict the responses of natural plant communities to environmental changes, to improve our mechanistic understanding of the factors underlying plant-soil feedback strength and sign (negative, neutral and positive) under changing environmental conditions. Based on the growth versus defence trade-off hypothesis, fast-growing plant species with acquisitive traits build up negative feedback, whereas slow-growing species with conservative traits develop positive feedback with their own soil biota. The growth-defence framework is widely based on leaf spectrum economy, and it is unknown how well predictive aboveground traits are for growth strategies of plant roots belowground. With my proposed project PLECTRA, I aim to investigate how well the sign and strength of plant-soil feedback can be predicted from aboveground and belowground plant traits. This knowledge will improve our understanding of the role that plant-soil feedback plays in structuring plant communities and will, among others, be helpful to enhance restoration success of degraded ecosystems and improve management of invasive species.

Keywords: aboveground belowground interactions,leaf traits,growth defence trade off,plant soil feedback,root traits,successional gradient,trait based ecology