Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Deep genetics to study and uncover ‘hidden’ biology (DeepGenetics)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Panel description: For all organis ms: Genetics, epigenetics, genomics  and other ‘omics studies , bioinformatics, systems biology , genetic diseases , gene editing, innovative methods and modelling,  ‘omics for personalised  medicine
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS (ERC-2023-ADG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-09-01
End date: 2029-08-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2451625.0
EU funding (EUR): 2451625.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Human genes are organized in complex networks, to produce thousands of proteins to perform a myriad of functions. Whereas we have detailed maps for most biochemical pathways, the wiring of genetic networks in human cells is poorly understood. Development of powerful human genetic tools (CRISPR, RNAi, haploid cells), to which I made crucial contributions, have proven invaluable to study genetic networks. However, they face two major limitations. First, they provide information at the gene level, whereas it will be much more informative to understand genetic regulation at the level of protein domains or individual amino acids. Second, important biology can be masked – for example, by the cell state or interfering activity of other genes. With DeepGenetics we will bring our understanding of the genetic regulation of cellular phenotypes to the next level and mine ‘hidden biology’ that even impacts on well-studied cellular traits. We will (i) counterbalance the use of loss-of-function and gain-of-function genetics to obtain a solid gene-level inventory on the regulation of cellular phenotypes; (ii) identify genes that ‘mask’ unknown biology and use modifier screens to expose and define these processes – as we have recently exemplified in my group leading to the discovery of important new cellular pathways, and (iii) connect phenotypes to the functional protein domains and ultimately to the amino acid level. Thus, DeepGenetics will provide precise views on the regulation of key cellular phenotypes at the amino acid level and will cross the boundaries of our knowledge by exposing ‘hidden biology’.
Novel external filter for the washing machine to stop microfibre pollution (FibreLESS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Accelerator
Destination: Other destinations
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Slovenia
Call: EIC Accelerator 2024 - Short application (HORIZON-EIC-2024-ACCELERATOR-01, 2024)
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2500000.0
EU funding (EUR): 2500000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Microplastics constitute a large part of plastic pollution. The Environmental Investigation Agency estimated that a total of 51 trillion microplastic particles have accumulated in the ocean, with up to 219k tons of microplastics entering the sea from Europe each year. Microplastic pollution caused by the washing processes of synthetic textiles has recently been assessed as the main source of primary microplastics in the oceans. FibreLESS is the first large-scale, highly efficient retrofit filter for stopping microfibre emissions from domestic and commercial washing - a major source of microplastic pollution. The EIC funding will enable PlanetCare to optimize FibresLESS and to perform all the validation activities necessary to start commercialization in Europe.

Keywords: pollution and climate,marine ecosystems and processes,household products
PHOTO-ELECTROCATALYTIC ROUTES FOR LONG-TERM SUSTAINABLE HYDROGEN STORAGE (PECATHS) (PECATHS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Climate, Energy and Mobility
Theme: Energy
Destination: Cross-sectoral solutions for the climate transition
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Spain,Ireland,Belgium,Switzerland
Call: Emerging energy technologies for a climate neutral Europe (HORIZON-CL5-2024-D2-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-01-01
End date: 2028-12-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2049322.5
EU funding (EUR): 2049322.5
Participants: 7
Project status: SIGNED

PeCATHS is committed to developing an integrated long-term energy storage system utilizing hydrogen in the form of liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs), coupled with innovative biomass conversion. This approach enables the direct transfer of hydrogen from biomass to LOHCs without the hydrogen gas production, while simultaneously generating high-value chemicals. By integrating chemical and energy sectors, the project aims to synthesize platform chemicals and achieve long-term energy storage in liquid form, enhancing both the sustainability and efficiency of energy systems. A major advantage of LOHC technology is its ability to transform hydrogen gas into a stable liquid energy carrier, significantly facilitating the storage, transport and distribution. To tackle the economic challenges associated with this technology, PeCATHS employs a cost-effective strategy that utilizes biomass as a hydrogen source and solar power as a renewable energy source. This method allows for the direct integration of hydrogen into LOHCs without the complexities of gas compression and storage, thereby reducing costs and enhancing competitiveness against conventional energy storage systems. PeCATHS addresses the critical need for sustainable and viable energy storage, transport, and distribution solutions through the use of advanced (photo)electrocatalytic transformations. This project not only aims to reduce operational costs but also seeks to contribute to the development of sustainable energy infrastructures vital for future energy networks.

Keywords: photo electrocatalysis,liquid organic hydrogen carriers,hydrogen storage
Cell-instructive matrices to deconstruct tumour tissues (Design2Guide)

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: Germany
Call: ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS (ERC-2023-POC, 2023)
Start date: 2024-01-01
End date: 2025-06-30
Duration (months): 18.0
Total project cost (EUR): 150000.0
EU funding (EUR): 150000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This research addresses a clinical problem with an innovative approach. Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers and only 10% of patients survive 5 years after diagnosis. To find better therapies, we need patient-specific models that mimic the biology of tumour tissues and target interactions between different cell types. We will develop a controllable platform for modelling the human disease in the laboratory. We will use our new platform to discover better ways of treating the disease.
Impact Monitor 2 (Impact Monitor 2)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Climate, Energy and Mobility
Theme: Mobility
Destination: Clean and competitive solutions for all transport modes
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Germany,Italy,United Kingdom,Belgium,Netherlands,France,Greece,Spain
Call: Impact monitoring of EU Aviation R&I (HORIZON-CL5-2024-D5-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-02-01
End date: 2028-01-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3000000.0
EU funding (EUR): 3000000.0
Participants: 10
Project status: SIGNED

Impact Monitor 2 is a project to deliver a coherent and holistic Toolbox and Framework, including their application to preliminary impact assessments of R&I from Horizon Europe projects, Clean Aviation and SESAR 3, that will be the reference choice for the definition and assessment of environmental, climate and competitiveness policy options of European aviation R&I and regulatory measures. Bolstered by its profound knowledge and multidisciplinary expertise, a consortium consisting of 10 research establishments and academic institutes deliver this Toolbox and Framework with preliminary impact assessments, by building on the experience and outcomes of the project from HORIZON-CL5-2022-D5-01-14 of the same consortium and by exploiting the consortium’s close working relationships with EC (e.g. DGs CLIMA, MOVE, ENV and RTD), Clean Aviation, SESAR 3, and EASA. This Toolbox and Framework advance the already established reference Toolbox and Framework developed in that project through enhancing the systematic approach to perform coherent and holistic impact assessments of European aviation R&I and the support to key stakeholders in science-based informed policy decision-making for European aviation R&I with improved analysis capabilities and newly integrated impact models. Assessments are carried out for both SMR and LR vehicles for climate, environment and competitiveness.

Keywords: aviation,randi,impact assessment,support for decision making
Sustainable Training of Code Language Models through Data Refinement (condenSE)

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: Norway
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01, 2023)
Start date: 2024-04-01
End date: 2026-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 210911.04
EU funding (EUR): 210911.04
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread attention and user adoption. These models, when trained on source code from platforms like GitHub, acquire a deep understanding of both the semantic and syntactic structures of code (i.e., code language models or CLMs). This understanding has paved the way for significant advancements in software engineering, offering developers valuable assistance in labor-intensive tasks like bug fixing and code writing. While CLMs offer tremendous assistance in software engineering tasks, their massive data requirements result in substantial energy consumption and CO2 emissions. This proposal challenges the conventional wisdom that "more data is better" and instead advocates for a refined approach to data in the training of CLMs. We propose that by intentionally decreasing training data volume while simultaneously enhancing data quality through data refinement techniques, we can reduce energy consumption while maintaining or even improving performance on software engineering tasks. The condenSE project represents a pioneering effort to advance sustainable training practices for CLMs. Unlike existing methods, which are often non-systematic or limited to natural languages, condenSE promises a comprehensive approach to achieve sustainability via data refinement for CLMs. This initiative is well-aligned with the EU Green Deal initiative and UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the increasing attention for LLMs and CLMs means that now is the right time to address their sustainability. The proposal's potential for success is further strengthened by the host institution's international standing, providing a wide range of collaborative opportunities, as well as by the complementary expertise of the applicant and supervisor, spanning the fields of software engineering, machine learning, dataset creation, and language model application.

Keywords: sustainability,large language models,software engineering,data refinement,pre training,fine tuning
Quantifying Freedom: Data production and everyday life in the Liberated African village, 1807-1901 (QFR)

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: United Kingdom
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 (HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01, 2024)
Start date: 2026-01-01
End date: 2027-12-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 276187.92
EU funding (EUR): 276187.92
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Quantifying Freedom: Data production and everyday life in the Liberated African village, 1807-1901, is a historical ethnography of Liberated African villages in colonial Sierra Leone and the Gambia under British rule. Upon being returned to the coast, many Liberated Africans were settled in English-styled villages managed by the Church Missionary (CMS) and Methodist Missionary Societies (MMS), with oversight from the colonial Liberated African Department. These villages initially formed the basis of an abolitionist social experiment: to attempt to prove the relative productivity of free black labor over slave labor, the civilizational capacities of Africans and alternatives to the slave trade. To this end, these villages were simultaneously sites of data creation and extraction in which clergy village ‘managers’ collected data on everything from church attendance to livestock numbers. After an initial wave of British and German missionary managers, Liberated Africans took over these positions and innovated their own data collection processes that responded to their questions and concerns. This project proposes to study data-driven social reform, race, and the expansion of the British Empire in West Africa in the aftermath of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. The objective is to both understand and formulate an account for the impact of the quantification in the Liberated African village on ideas of race within the British Empire, on histories and techniques of British data collection and strategies of colonial governance and social reform in West Africa and Britain. The objectives in terms of training and career advancement is to improve the researchers capacity to produce high-impact publications, to acquire more experience in collaborating with others in teaching and designing courses, public outreach , improvement in the researchers quantitative skills through engagement with quantitatively focused research groups and training programs at Cambridge.

Keywords: liberated africans,emancipation,racial data,data revolution,gambia,sierra leone,data collection,british empire
Characterization of spinal learning in a repetitive yet skilled locomotor task (SpiLearn)

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: Belgium
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2021 (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01, 2021)
Start date: 2022-06-01
End date: 2024-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 175920.0
EU funding (EUR): 175920.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Animals adjust movement throughout their life to adapt to a changing environment and to learn new motor skills. The underlying mechanisms have been studied for decades, almost exclusively as a function of the brain. Interestingly, however, the spinal cord adapts and learns motor sequences without the brain, using only spinal sensory feedback. Therefore, the spinal cord must contain adequate neuronal circuitry for motor learning. This project aims to characterize brain-independent mechanisms of learning that take place within the spinal cord. With a complete thoracic transection, I will functionally isolate the lumbar spinal cord from the brain and enable hindlimb locomotion on a motorized treadmill with pharmacological stimulation. Using a skilled yet repetitive locomotor paradigm, I will identify cell-types indispensable for obstacle learning through circuit manipulation. Our preliminary data indicate that mice learn to avoid obstacles and improve their performance over weeks. We will test the integrity of this performance upon specific and acute inhibition of a selected neuronal population during the behavioral task. Furthermore, using in-vivo awake eletrophysiological recordings, I will characterize circuit dynamics that underlie motor learning capacity attributed to the spinal cord while mice perform the obstacle task. This project maximizes the synergies of the host lab’s expertise, i.e., kinematic analysis, circuit dissection, and the use of high-density Neuropixel probes, and my expertise in electrophysiological recordings in mouse spinal cord. In addition to implementing an innovative system of multichannel recordings of spinal circuits in behaving mice, knowledge gained from this project will enable linking cell-type specific activity profiles in the spinal cord to a motor learning behaviour for the first time. This link is an essential yet currently missing piece to understand how the spinal cord contributes to the acquisition of a new motor repertoire.

Keywords: spinal cord,motor learning,behavior,electrophysiology,circuit dissection,locomotion
Philosophy of COSMOlogy: Matter And SpaceTime ERadicated (COSMO-MASTER)

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: Netherlands
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2022-STG, 2022)
Start date: 2023-04-01
End date: 2028-03-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499790.0
EU funding (EUR): 1499790.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Our most basic, fundamental assumptions are often the ones that get scrutinised the least. This very much holds true for the primary ontological and conceptual distinction that underlies much of physics, philosophy of physics and metaphysics: the idea that all entities and structures in our universe are to be categorised and conceptualized as either space (or, in modern physics, spacetime) or matter, never both, never neither. Everything must be either the “container” or the “contained”. Although this strict conceptual dichotomy did make a lot of sense in the context of our pre-20th-century worldview, the COSMO-MASTER project contends that it is no longer tenable, and even a hindrance to further progress. More precisely, each of the main ingredients—dark matter, inflation, dark energy, black holes and general relativity—of our highly-successful and well-established standard model of cosmology that was developed over the course of the 20th century puts pressure on the outdated Newtonian idea that the space(time) and matter concepts can and should be strictly distinguished. A systematic interdisciplinary analysis of the extent to which this dichotomy breaks down will have profound consequences for various debates in the philosophy of physics and metaphysics (e.g., undermining the substantivalism-relationalism debate about the metaphysics of spacetime, and providing novel opportunities to reassess and advance debates regarding conventionalism, scientific realism and scientific guiding principles) as well as for theory development and community interaction in cosmology, and physics more broadly. Far from being an unwelcome babel, a conceptual undoing, giving up the spacetime-matter distinction will provide guidance as to which traditional debates become moot and which novel avenues open up.

Keywords: philosophy of physics,philosophy of cosmology,metaphysics of science,substantivalism vs relationalism,conventionalism,scientific realism,dark matter,dark energy,black holes,inflation
It takes two to TAngO2: unravelling the role of syntrophic interactions in the evolution of anaerobic eukaryotes (TANGO2)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Panel description: For all organisms : Ecology, biodiversity, environmental change , evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology, microbial ecology , marine biology, ecophysiology, theoretical developments and mod elling
Countries involved: Sweden
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2022-STG, 2022)
Start date: 2023-05-01
End date: 2028-04-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1657193.0
EU funding (EUR): 1657193.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Living without oxygen is challenging. To live in low-oxygen environments, some microbes exchange nutrients allowing for a division of labor among individuals in a process called ‘syntrophy’. Such interactions are often a pre-requisite for prokaryotes living in these environments. Whether syntrophy is necessary for the survival of microbial eukaryotes (protists) is unexplored and yet, critically important to discerning the roles of eukaryotes in nature and how eukaryotic cells adapt to live without oxygen. TAngO2 will test the hypothesis that syntrophic partnerships allow eukaryotes to thrive in anaerobic environments and underpin the evolution of key eukaryotic cell biological characteristics. This will be accomplished using state-of-the-art genomic, computational, and experimental approaches. I will discover genes essential for interactions between a model protist and its ectosymbiont using massively-parallelized transposon mutagenesis. This will discern the molecular mechanisms, metabolic interplay, and selective forces dictating eukaryote:prokaryote interactions. I will deliver metagenomes of cultured anaerobic eukaryote:prokaryote consortia predicted to be engaging in syntrophic interactions. This will drastically expand our knowledge of the biodiversity of eukaryotic genomes and microbial interactions from low-oxygen environments. I will interrogate the frequency and diversity of syntrophy in eukaryotes by simultaneously sequencing the genomes and transcriptomes ofindividual protist cells and their microbiota sampled from nature. This will provide the first elucidation of what communities co-exist with natural anaerobic protists. Understanding how syntrophic interactions have influenced eukaryotic cell biology will reveal hidden connections in the complicated functional networks of the eukaryotic cell. TAngO2 will open research avenues by bridging the fields of evolutionary cell biology and microbiology to understand ancient and recent symbiotic

Keywords: mitochondrial evolution,protists,anaerobic metabolism,syntrophy