ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The human kind is witnessing an escalation of obesity-related health problems such as cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes. A recent groundbreaking study revealed adiponectin receptors (ADIPOR) as key targets for treating such obesity-related diseases. Indeed, the modulation of this integral membrane protein by small molecules agonists ameliorates diabetes and prolongs lifespan of genetically obese rodent model. Despite these exciting results and the importance of ADIPOR in human physiology, there is a complete lack of knowledge of ADIPOR mechanisms of action and pharmacology. This is mainly due to the challenges associated with the characterization of membrane protein structure and function. To fill this gap of knowledge and based on my extensive experience in membrane protein biology, I propose here to characterize the the proximal signaling pathways associated with ADIPOR activation as well as the molecular and structural mechanisms of ADIPOR activation. We will develop an innovative integrated strategy combining state-of-the-art molecular and structural pharmacology approaches including 1) molecular analyses of ADIPOR network of interaction using resonance energy transfer measurement in living cells and a proteomic analysis and 2) structural analyses of ADIPOR and signaling complexes using biophysics and X-ray crystallography. Our data will have a major impact on drug discovery for treating obesity-related diseases as it will enable the application of structure-based drug design and in silico screening for the molecular control of ADIPOR activity. The proposed high-risk endeavor of obtaining structural data on these atypical membrane signaling complexes is a new direction both for my career and for the field of adiponectin biology; the exceptionally high gain from these studies fully justifies the risks; the feasibility of this project is supported by my recent success in membrane protein pharmacology, biochemistry, biophysics and crystallography.

1 989 518 €

Start date: 2015-07-01, End date: 2020-06-30

Alfonsine astronomy is arguably among the first European scientific achievements. It shaped a scene for actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There is however little detailed historical analysis encompassing its development in its full breadth. ALFA addresses this issue by studying tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way relying on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy. ALFA integrates these approaches not only to benefit from different perspectives but also to build new questions from their interactions. For instance the analysis of mathematical practices in astral sciences manuscripts induces new ways to analyse the documents and to think about astronomical questions. Relying on these approaches the main objectives of ALFA are thus to: - Retrace the development of the corpus of Alfonsine texts from its origin in the second half of the 13th century to the end of the 15th century by following, on the manuscript level, the milieus fostering it; - Analyse the Alfonsine astronomers’ practices, their relations to mathematics, to the natural world, to proofs and justification, their intellectual context and audiences; - Build a meaningful narrative showing how astronomers in different milieus with diverse practices shaped, also from Arabic materials, an original scientific scene in Europe. ALFA will shed new light on the intellectual history of the late medieval period as a whole and produce a better understanding of its relations to related scientific periods in Europe and beyond. It will also produce methodological breakthroughs impacting the ways history of knowledge is practiced outside the field of ancient and medieval sciences. Efforts will be devoted to bring these results not only to the relevant scholarly communities but also to a wider audience as a resource in the public debates around science, knowledge and culture.

1 871 250 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

The role of experience in language acquisition has been the focus of heated theoretical debates, between proponents of nativist views according to whom experience plays a minimal role and advocates of empiricist positions holding that experience, be it linguistic, social or other, is sufficient to account for language acquisition. Despite more than a half century of dedicated research efforts, the problem is not solved. The present project brings a novel perspective to this debate, combining hitherto unconnected research in language acquisition with recent advances in the neurophysiology of hearing and speech processing. Specifically, it claims that prenatal experience with speech, which mainly consists of prosody due to the filtering effects of the womb, is what shapes the speech perception system, laying the foundations of subsequent language learning. Prosody is thus the cue that links genetically endowed predispositions present in the initial state with language experience. The proposal links the behavioral and neural levels, arguing that the hierarchy of the neural oscillations corresponds to a unique developmental chronology in human infants’ experience with speech and language. The project uses state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques, EEG & NIRS, with monolingual full term newborns, as well as full-term bilingual, preterm and deaf newborns to investigate the link between prenatal experience and subsequent language acquisition. It proposes to follow the developmental trajectories of these four populations from birth to 6 and 9 months of age.

1 621 250 €

Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31

From testicular grafting (1920s) to step counting watches (2014), the perceptions and practices of health seeking individuals have been marked by continuities and profound changes during a twentieth century largely shaped by the advent of a communication society. Visuals can be a source to understand transformations by postulating an interactive, performative power of mass media in societies. Which roles did visuals play in changes from public health and human capital collective understandings of the healthy self to new (sometimes debated) perceptions and practices of our bodies as forms of individual capital in an increasing market-economized world? Pursuing these questions, the project focuses on four fields of investigation -food/nutrition; movement/exercise/sports; sexuality/reproduction/infants and dependency/addiction/overconsumption- in Germany, France and Great Britain studied with an entangled history framework. Within this scope the project aims at understanding (1)how visuals shape our health related self-understandings and practices in a continuity/discontinuity from the bio-political to the bio-economic logic. (2) The project will explore and explain how and why understandings of body capital differ or overlap in European countries. (3) The project will analyse if and how visual media serve as a promotion-communication hyphen for twentieth century preventive-self understanding. With a visual perspective on a long twentieth century, the project seeks to better understand changes and continuities in the history of health intertwined with the history of media. This will provide new insights into how the internalization of bodycapital has evolved throughout the past century, how transformations in the media world (from film to TV to internet) play out at the individual level and how health challenges and cultural differences in body perceptions and practices persist in producing social distinction in an age of global information and advanced health systems.

2 492 124 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

Mindfulness-based therapy has become an increasingly popular treatment to reduce stress, increase well-being and prevent relapse in depression. A key component of these therapies includes mindfulness practice that intends to train attention to detect and regulate afflictive cognitive and emotional patterns. Beyond its therapeutic application, the empirical study of mindfulness practice also represents a promising tool to understand practices that intentionally cultivate present-centeredness and openness to experience. Despite its clinical efficacy, little remains known about its means of action. Antithetic to this mode of experiential self-focus are states akin to depression, that are conducive of biased attention toward negativity, biased thoughts and rumination, and dysfunctional self schemas. The proposed research aims at implementing an innovative framework to scientifically investigate the experiential, cognitive, and neural processes underlining mindfulness practice building on the current neurocognitive understanding of the functional and anatomical architecture of cognitive control, and depression. To identify these mechanisms, this project aims to use paradigms from cognitive, and affective neuroscience (MEG, intracortical EEG, fMRI) to measure the training and plasticity of emotion regulation and cognitive control, and their effect on automatic, self-related affective processes. Using a cross-sectional design, this project aims to compare participants with trait differences in experiential self-focus mode. Using a longitudinal design, this project aims to explore mindfulness-practice training’s effect using a standard mindfulness-based intervention and an active control intervention. The PI has pioneered the neuroscientific investigation of mindfulness in the US and aspires to assemble a research team in France and a network of collaborators in Europe to pursue this research, which could lead to important outcomes for neuroscience, and mental health.

1 868 520 €

Start date: 2014-11-01, End date: 2019-10-31

For over half a millennium, the great medieval capital of Angkor lay at the heart of a vast empire stretching across much of mainland SE Asia. Recent research has revealed that the famous monuments of Angkor were merely the epicentre of an immense settlement complex, with highly elaborate engineering works designed to manage water and mitigate the uncertainty of monsoon rains. Compelling evidence is now emerging that other temple complexes of the medieval Khmer Empire may also have formed the urban cores of dispersed, low-density settlements with similar systems of hydraulic engineering. Using innovative airborne laser scanning (‘lidar’) technology, CALI will uncover, map and compare archaeological landscapes around all the major temple complexes of Cambodia, with a view to understanding what role these complex and vulnerable water management schemes played in the growth and decline of early civilisations in SE Asia. CALI will evaluate the hypothesis that the Khmer civilisation, in a bid to overcome the inherent constraints of a monsoon environment, became locked into rigid and inflexible traditions of urban development and large-scale hydraulic engineering that constrained their ability to adapt to rapidly-changing social, political and environmental circumstances. By integrating data and techniques from fast-developing archaeological sciences like remote sensing, palaeoclimatology and geoinformatics, this work will provide important insights into the reasons for the collapse of inland agrarian empires in the middle of the second millennium AD, a transition that marks the emergence of modern mainland SE Asia. The lidar data will provide a comprehensive and internally-consistent archive of urban form at a regional scale, and offer a unique experimental space for evaluating socio-ecological resilience, persistence and transformation over two thousand years of human history, with clear implications for our understanding of contemporary urbanism and of urban futures.

1 482 844 €

Start date: 2015-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29

"Clonal evolution represents a driving force for cancer cells and a major challenge for therapy. There is a long-standing knowledge that clonal diversification and selection allows cancer cells to pass through distinct steps of transformation. More recently has emerged the concept that ""more malignant"" leukemia subclones can persist after treatment leading to relapse. My research is focused on two diseases which represent privileged models to study clonal evolution: Fanconi anemia (FA), which is a genetic condition predisposing to acute leukemia, and T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL), an aggressive leukemia which frequently relapses. The goal of this project is to decipher the crucial molecular and cellular events that drive gain of malignancy and to design new strategies to follow up and treat the patients. Specifically, we aim to: 1. Identify the key pathways involved in leukemia progression at two major steps: from pre-leukemia to overt leukemia (in FA), and from primary diagnosis to relapse (in T-ALL). This aim will use high-throughput molecular profiling and functional characterization of longitudinal samples from patients. 2. Model leukemia progression in vivo to functionally validate these pathways. We have developed read-outs based on gene silencing in human primary cells from patients followed by leukemia monitoring in immunodeficient mice. 3. Define new strategies to prevent the transition towards acute leukemia in pre-leukemic states in FA patients. We will develop new markers for transformation that should help in monitoring therapeutic intervention. 4. Test drugs in pre-clinical models to target critical pathways of relapsed ALL. We will use xenografted T-ALL which recapitulates leukemia progression. Completion of this innovative transversal project should markedly improve the knowledge on tumor progression and lead to new strategies to prevent, early detect and/or treat relapse, with the final objective to cure more patients."

1 497 028 €

Start date: 2013-04-01, End date: 2018-03-31

Each year, civil wars cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, ecological disruptions, regional instability. These conflicts encompass many players and their effects are felt not only at the regional level but also within Western societies (refugees, terrorism, sectarian tensions). Despite this, no systematic comparison of civil wars have been conducted using a qualitative method. Social scientists are struggling to understand these breakdowns of the social order, which are fertile from a theoretical perspective because they de-trivialize the social functioning. In civil war, the partial or total institutional collapse marks the end of the (imperfect) monopoly of the state with regards to violence and justice, challenges the social and ethnic hierarchies and also provokes fluctuation of the economic and social capital. Accordingly, we will address three questions. First, the sudden and non-anticipated reconfiguration of modes of accumulation and conversion of capitals and the relationship between social fields. Next, the formation of competing institutions by politico-military movements involved in the construction of an alternative political order. Finally, individual adaptations to risks and uncertainty affecting the ability of actors to anticipate the consequences of their actions and reassess their own values and engagement. The implementation of this program of comparative sociology of civil wars will draw on extensive fieldwork. This requires an adapted methodology for researchers faced with unpredictable situations, where quantitative methods fall short. Prosopography, semi- or unstructured interviews and participant observation are therefore prioritised. The creation of an interdisciplinary team of sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists will be able to carry out research based on thick description, following 25 years of experience by the PI in collecting data and supervising researchers in areas afflicted by civi

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

The application's unifying theme is cognition. Any decision reflects the information that comes to the decision-maker's awareness at the moment of making the decision. In turn, this information is the stochastic outcome of a sequence of more or less conscious choices and of awareness manipulation by third parties. The three parts of this application all are concerned with two factors of limited awareness (cognitive costs and motivated beliefs) and with the application of imperfect cognition to economics. The various projects can be subsumed into three themes, each with different subprojects: 1. Self-serving beliefs, laws, norms and taboos (expressive function of the law, taboos, dignity and contracts). 2. Cognition, markets, and contracts (mechanism design under costly cognition, directing attention in markets and politics). 3. Cognition and individual decision-making (foundations of some non-standard preferences). The methodology for this research will be that of formal economic modeling and welfare analysis, enriched with important insights from psychology and sociology. It will also include experimental (laboratory) investigations. The output will first take the form of a series of articles in economics journals, as well as, for the research described in Part 1, a book to disseminate the research to broader, multidisciplinary and non-specialized audiences.

1 910 400 €

Start date: 2010-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

This project will analyse historical change in the Mediterranean over the long run. It challenges totalising narratives aiming to “europeanise” Mediterranean history as having led somewhat naturally to European domination in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of the one-sided view of institutional and territorial integration as a consequence of the mere diffusion of European institutional models and legal codifications linked to a supposed lex mercatoria rediviva or law merchant in force in all countries and at all times, the specific approach of this project consists in combining concrete local, regional and thematic approaches with a focus on trade as the most widely accepted interaction even in times of sharp conflict, and on commercial and maritime litigation as an indicator for the intensity and changing modes of intercultural exchange. In an actor-centred perspective, we will take into account a variety of individual and institutional actors involved in trade. Their interaction was based on a combination of shared customs, local usages and legal traditions. Addressing competing instances and drawing on different legal resources, they contributed to a reconfiguration of the legal and institutional landscape. These issues will be investigated through the comparative analysis of commercial litigation and conciliation concerning trade in Mediterranean port cities, with a focus on disputes involving litigants who were not subjects of the local authorities, or whose legal status was linked to their religious identity. The encounters of Muslim, Jewish, Armenian, Protestant merchants and sailors with different legal customs and judicial practices appear as the social sites of legal and cultural creativity. Through the prism of commercial litigation, we will thus achieve a more precise and deeper understanding of the practices of intercultural trade, in a context profoundly shaped by legal pluralism and multiple and overlapping spaces of jurisdiction.

2 484 000 €

Start date: 2012-09-01, End date: 2018-06-30

Music performance is considered by many to be one of the most breath taking feats of human intelligence. That music performance is a creative act is no longer a disputed fact, but the very nature of this creative work remains illusive. Taking the view that the creative work of performance is the making and shaping of music structures, and that this creative thinking is a form of problem solving, COSMOS proposes an integrated programme of research to transform our understanding of the human experience of performed music, which is almost all music that we hear, and of the creativity of music performance, which addresses how music is made. The research themes are as follows: i) to find new ways to represent, explore, and talk about performance; ii) to harness volunteer thinking (citizen science) for music performance research by focussing on structures experienced and problem solving; iii) to create sandbox environments to experiment with making performed structures; iv) to create theoretical frameworks to discover the reasoning behind the structures perceived and made; and, v) to foster community engagement by training experts to provide feedback on structure solutions so as to increase public understanding of the creative work in music performance. Analysis of the perceived and designed structures will be based on a novel duality paradigm that turns conventional computational music structure analysis on its head to reverse engineer why a perceiver or a performer chooses a particular structure. Embedded in the approach is the use of computational thinking to optimise representations and theories to ensure accuracy, robustness, efficiency, and scalability. The PI is an established performer and a leading authority in music representation, music information research, and music perception and cognition. The project will have far reaching impact, reconfiguring expert and public views of music performance and time-varying music-like sequences such as cardiac arrhythmia.

2 495 776 €

Start date: 2019-06-01, End date: 2024-05-31

"This project aims to ""crack"" the emotional code of music, i.e. to provide, for the first time, a precise characterization of what type of music signal is able to activate one emotion or another. Research into this problem so far has been mainly correlating indistinct emotional reactions to uncontrolled musical stimuli, with much technical sophistication but to little avail. Project CREAM builds on the PI's unique bi-disciplinary career spanning both computer science and cognitive neuroscience, to propose a radically novel approach: instead of using audio signal processing to simply observe musical stimuli a posteriori, we will harvest a series of recent developments in the field to build powerful new tools of experimental control, able to engineer musical stimuli that can activate specific emotional pathways (e.g. music manipulated to sound like expressive speech, or to sound like survival-relevant environmental sounds). By combining this creative use of new technologies with a well-concerted mix of methods from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience (incl. psychoacoustics, fNIRS brain imaging, EEG/ERP paradigms, intercultural studies, infant studies), project CREAM will yield the first functional description of the neural and cognitive processes involved in the induction of emotions by music, and establish new avenues for interdisciplinary research between the life sciences and the information sciences. But most spectacularly, the fundamental breakthroughs brought by project CREAM will unlatch the therapeutic potential of musical emotions. Music will become a cognitive technology, with algorithms able to ""engineer"" it to mobilize one neuronal pathway or another, non-intrusively and non-pharmacologically. Within the proposed 5-year plan, support from the ERC will allow to implement a series of high-impact clinical studies with are direct applications of our findings, e.g. for the linguistic rehabilitation of aphasic stroke victims."

1 499 992 €

Start date: 2014-10-01, End date: 2019-09-30

"At the core of this research proposal is the aim of reconstructing and understanding the nature, exact trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural contact and transfers between Europeans and the native people of the Americas, focusing on, but not limited to, the Nahuatl-speaking zone of central Mexico. A major innovation of this project is to study this process of cross-cultural communication in its full historical depth, through the colonial and postcolonial eras up to the present day and encompassing different stages and types of contact. The meticulous and cross-disciplinary study of an extensive body of texts in Nahuatl (“Aztec”) and Spanish, complemented by present-day ethnolinguistic data, will make it possible to deduce and understand patterns across time and space in ways novel to existing scholarship, embracing both micro- and macroregional trends. The proposed research starts with identifying transfers in language, studied systematically through the creation of extensive databases, but leads to exploring the substance of cross-cultural transfer and the essence of developments, becoming a fundamental way of studying culture and its transformations. Thus, an important aim is the correlation of language phenomena with more general contact-induced culture change, including especially evolving forms of political, social and municipal organization in the native world, where the change is more salient. Breaking existing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities, the project embraces both indigenous and European perspectives, assuming that the innovation of studying both sides in a single framework and in the proposed time span is particularly promising in dealing with a notably two-sided, prolonged historical process. The complementary lines of research, native and Spanish, are expected to highlight and make understandable factors underlying and facilitating cultural convergence between them in different aspects of colonial life and beyond."

1 318 840 €

Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2017-11-30

In France, the UK, Germany, the US, and Israel, a growing number of films and television series are set ‘behind the scenes’ of democratic regimes faced with terrorist threats. These works reveal a moral state of the world. They may be analysed as ‘mirrors’ of society, or as ideological tools. But they can also be understood as new resources for the education, creativity, and perfectibility of their audiences; as the emergence of a form of ‘soft power’ that can serve as a resource for public policies and democratic conversation. Because of their format (weekly/seasonal regularity, home viewing) and the participatory qualities of the Internet (tweeting, sharing, liking, chat forums), series allow for a new form of education by expressing complex issues through narrative and characters. As a result, TV series are increasingly recognised in current research. However, their aesthetic potential for visualising ethical issues and their capacity at enabling a democratic empowerment of viewers has not yet been analysed ; nor their power for confronting cultural and social upheavals underway, and developing a collective inquiry into democratic values and human security. DEMOSERIES brings together a team of scholars of moral philosophy, film studies, digital media and cultural data, sociology, law and political science, to explore a corpus of TV ‘security series’ from conception to reception. Doing so requires a particularist ethics based on attention to multi-faceted situations, paired with qualitative methods (interviews with security experts, showrunners, viewers; analyses of images, tropes, words; ethnography of reception) and quantitative methods (tweets and web analytics). By elucidating how these series are conceived by their creators and audiences, DEMOSERIES thus aims to understand if and how they might play a crucial role in building the awareness necessary for the safety of individuals and societies, and in creating shared and shareable values in the EU and beyond.

2 216 375 €

Start date: 2020-01-01, End date: 2024-12-31

Every year a brain stroke will impair approximately 2 million Europeans. Notwithstanding recent progress, many of these individuals will have persistent cognitive deficits, impacting their personality, degrading their quality of life and preventing their return to work. Early identification of anatomical predictors of brain recovery may significantly reduce the burden of these deficits on patients, their families and wider society, while also leading to the discovery of new targets for treatments. I have pioneered the development of imaging techniques that allow for the exploration of the relationship between brain disconnection and neuropsychological syndromes. With these tools, I aim to demonstrate that the structural organisation of the human brain's connections is the common denominator supporting functional specialisation and, when damaged, neuropsychological disorders. Building on my expertise, I plan to (1) establish an atlas mapping the function of white matter for the entire human brain, (2) fractionate the stroke population according to disconnection profiles, (3) predict neuropsychological symptoms based on disconnection profiles, and (4) characterise and manipulate the fine biology involved in the disconnection recovery.In so doing, this project will introduce a paradigm shift in the relationship between brain structure, function and behavioural/cognitive disorders. I will deliver a comprehensive biological model of the neurocircuitry that supports neuropsychological syndromes, which will gather the modular organisation of primary idiotypic functions with the integrative organisation of highly associative levels of functions. In the long term, this project will allow me to determine if measures of brain ‘connectivity’ can be translated into advanced standard procedures that provide for a more personalised medicine, that focuses upon rehabilitation and improving the prediction of symptom recovery, while providing new targets for pharmacological treatment.

1 999 201 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

DREAM, Drafting and Enacting the Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean, seeks to write the history of the revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean since the independences. It aims to write a transnational history of often forgotten struggles, recall facts and original forms of resistance. We know very few about the revolts that occurred in this period, and even less about the memory that they left in the societies, the way these memories circulated. This rediscovery of revolutions in the shadows must be done through the collection of original material, specifically “poor archives” of the ordinary and the production of Archives – through a combination of classical interviews and innovative methods that involve researchers, archivists, artists and the actors themselves. The objective is to write a history that focuses on emotions and paths of revolts, telling us more about the link between all dimensions of human lives in these territories (religion, gender, social positions) and the articulation of these dimensions in the revolutionary projects. DREAM aims to write a history that doesn’t produce heroes or big figures, doesn’t discuss success or failure, but tries to understand the motivations and the potentialities that were at stake in different episodes and moments, during the uprisings and in between them. It aims to explore the historical signification and the concrete aspects of the call for dignity (Karama/sharaf) in a space that, after liberating itself from the colonial domination, was trapped into the illusion of a common faith (being it the Arab nation or the Islamic umma) and the concrete oppression of authoritarian regimes. This period needs urgently to be explored and history, with its modern tools and patterns, can embrace and trace the particular conditions in which Arab people lived for more than six decades, and specifically the frames of their dreams and projections.

1 941 050 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

This proposal is centred on the development of small molecule probes derived from DNA damaging agents to identify their genomic targets using a novel unbiased approach. Although, several genotoxic drugs have been used for decades to treat cancers, the exact mechanisms by which they operate are not fully understood. It is established that these compounds interfere with the processes of transcription and replication, thereby promoting genomic instability and cell death. However, there is as yet no genome-wide map of the exact location of sites that are putative targets for these drugs in vivo. This information is critical to understand and rationalize cellular responses to genotoxic agents. Here, we propose to develop an innovative discovery- based methodology that will combine click chemistry in situ, affinity pull-down techniques and high throughput DNA sequencing (Drug-Seq), to identify the genomic interactome of DNA damaging drugs in order to elucidate their cellular activity at the molecular level. Two independent lines of enquiry will be followed. Firstly, we will establish the genomic interacting landscape of landmark drugs including etoposide, camptothecin and cisplatin using Drug-Seq. Secondly, we will perform regular chromatin immuno- precipitation sequencing (ChIP-Seq) of selected proteins linked to the cellular response of interest to validate Drug-Seq and further identify druggable genomic sites. An important aim of this proposal is to establish a universal methodology to decipher small molecule/genome interactions in vivo that trigger a particular response in disease-relevant models. We also seek to interrogate the role of chromatin in regulating drug/genome interactions and to define whether it is possible to act on the epigenome to modulate the activity and specificity of these drugs. Collectively, we anticipate our study will lay down the foundation for personalized medicine with the implementation of rational rather than empirical clinical protocols.

1 999 900 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

"Distinguishing between conscious and unconscious processes is a fundamental issue for our understanding of the human mind. Most research on this topic has been limited to a static perspective, by studying static stimuli, by considering processing as a function of present information, and by focusing on a single, adult stage of development. Yet, both conscious and unconscious mental processes are intrinsically driven by dynamic properties. We will study these properties by relying on behavioral and brain imaging methods along three tracks: 1) Unconscious perception: Our visual system is, in real life, constantly receiving unconscious sequences of information that will generate dynamic and constantly updated processing streams. We will study these dynamic unconscious streams, thanks to Gaze-Contingent Substitution, a novel approach allowing for the presentation of subliminal videos and sequences of stimuli. 2) Conscious perception: Construction of a conscious percept does not only depend on present stimulation but also on interactions with prior knowledge. Relying on the Bayesian framework, we will study the mechanisms by which prior knowledge leads to the reconstruction of perceptual contents, by ""filling-in"" missing information during situations of partial awareness. 3) The maturation of consciousness: Using both psychophysical measures of visibility thresholds and high-density EEG, we will study the neural distinction between conscious and unconscious processes in pre-verbal infants, and whether consciousness develops through the maturation of posterior brain regions encoding sensory information, or rather anterior prefrontal regions related to attention and executive control. The expected impact of the project will be 1) to evidence sequential and complex forms of subliminal influences 2) to specify the cognitive mechanisms leading to perceptual illusions 3) to provide new insights on the mystery of how consciousness develops in humans."

1 437 520 €

Start date: 2011-02-01, End date: 2016-01-31

The objective of this project is to enhance knowledge in the construction, identification and estimation of dynamic structural microeconomic models that are used for policy evaluation. This research proposal is built up having specific economic applications in mind as these applications involve inter-temporal trade-offs for a single or several decision makers. It first seeks to develop original identification results in these applications and attaches special attention to partial identification issues and constructive identification results so as to easily derive estimation techniques. In each specific application, empirical estimates using micro-data will then be used to construct and analyse counterfactuals. The whole sequence of original identification, estimation and prediction results aims at enhancing the quality and credibility of economic policy evaluations. These research questions will be addressed in frameworks in which dynamic choices are continuous such as the ones regarding human capital investments or discrete such as the college choice decisions. This extends to dynamic games as in the analysis of firms' entry into a market. This research proposal develops micro-econometric analyses devoted to earning dynamics, consumption smoothing and incomplete markets, firms' entry, school matching mechanisms as well as to the dynamics of undergraduate studies and the dynamics of retirement. It involves studies in labor economics, consumer behavior as well as financial econometrics, empirical industrial organization and the economics of education. One last theme of this project is devoted to research in theoretical econometrics analyzing questions derived from the empirical projects. Each empirical project will cross fertilize others and will feed up theoretical econometric analyses related to point or partial identification in various dimensions. In turn, theoretical analyses will inform identification and estimation in each of those specific applications.

1 722 000 €

Start date: 2012-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31

This project offers a theoretical and empirical investigation of matching markets. Matching is, broadly speaking, the study of complementarities, which explains the formation of coalitions. Matching models are found in many applied fields within Economics: Labour Economics, Family Economics, Consumer theory of differentiated goods (hedonic models), Trade, etc. Desirable properties of these coalitions, such as stability, lead to testable implications of the surplus that individuals generate in a match, allowing for structural estimation of matching models. The goal of this proposal is to expand the frontiers of the theory of matching to design a very general and highly flexible model of matching that will lend itself to estimation and thus lead to empirical findings in various fields of Economics. Based on promising work initiated by the PI, this proposal seeks to bridge the gap between the theory and the empirics of matching markets that was traditionally observed in this literature. Particular focus will be given to situations where stable outcomes may not exist (such as unipartite, or one-to-many matching models), frictions, taxes. In these cases, a thorough investigation is carried on what solution concept should be used, and what are the testable implications. Applications will be given to various empirical issues or policy relevant questions such as: - The nature of the complementarities between senior and junior employees within teams, - The role played by the marriage market in the problem of rural depletion in China, - The impact of CEO risk aversion on assignment to firms, and on the CEO compensation package, - The pricing of attributes of French wines.

1 119 000 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2018-09-30

Cardiac electrical diseases are directly responsible for sudden cardiac death, heart failure and stroke. They result from a complex interplay between myocardial electrical activation and structural heterogeneity. Current diagnostic strategy based on separate electrocardiographic and imaging assessment is unable to grasp both these aspects. Improvements in personalised diagnostics are urgently needed as existing curative or preventive therapies (catheter ablation, multisite pacing, and implantable defibrillators) cannot be offered until patients are correctly recognised. My aim is to achieve a major advance in the way cardiac electrical diseases are characterised and thus diagnosed and treated, through the development of a novel non-invasive modality (Electrostructural Tomography), combining magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and non-invasive cardiac mapping (NIM) technologies. The approach will consist of: (1) hybridising NIM and MRI technologies to enable the joint acquisition of magnetic resonance images of the heart and torso and of a large array of body surface potentials within a single environment; (2) personalising the inverse problem of electrocardiography based on MRI characteristics within the heart and torso, to enable accurate reconstruction of cardiac electrophysiological maps from body surface potentials within the 3D cardiac tissue; and (3) developing a novel disease characterisation framework based on registered non-invasive imaging and electrophysiological data, and propose novel diagnostic and prognostic markers. This project will dramatically impact the tailored management of cardiac electrical disorders, with applications for diagnosis, risk stratification/patient selection and guidance of pacing and catheter ablation therapies. It will bridge two medical fields (cardiac electrophysiology and imaging), thereby creating a new research area and a novel semiology with the potential to modify the existing classification of cardiac electrical diseases.

1 475 000 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

We know remarkably little about the impact of war on political competition in postwar societies in spite of the fact that postwar elections have garnered tremendous interest from researchers in a variety of fields. That interest, however, has been limited to establishing the relationship between electoral democratization and the incidence of conflict. Voters’ and parties’ electoral behaviour after the immediate post‐conflict period have remained largely neglected by researchers. The proposed project will fill this gap in our understanding of electoral legacies of war by analysing the evolution of political competition over the course of more than two decades in the six postwar states of Southeast Europe: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Organised around three thematic areas/levels of analysis – voters, parties, communities – the project will lead to a series of important contributions. Through a combination of public opinion research, oral histories, and the innovative method of matching of individual census entries, the project will answer to which extent postwar elections are decided by voters’ experiences and perceptions of the ended conflict, as opposed to their considerations of the parties’ peacetime economic platforms and performance in office. In-depth study of party documents and platforms, party relations with the organisations of the postwar civil sector, as well as interviews with party officials and activists will shed light on the influence of war on electoral strategies, policy preferences, and recruitment methods of postwar political parties. And a combination of large-N research on the level of the region’s municipalities and a set of paired comparisons of several communities in the different postwar communities in the region will help expose the mechanisms through which war becomes embedded into postwar political competition and thus continues to exert its influence even decades after the violence has ended.

1 499 788 €

Start date: 2017-04-01, End date: 2022-03-31

Many efficient drugs have been designed to treat neurological disorders, but have failed in the clinic because they were toxic, could not cross the blood-brain barrier, and/or had deleterious side effects in healthy regions. I propose a conceptual breakthrough to solve these three issues, with minimally-invasive organic electronic ion pumps (OEIPs) to provide targeted treatment where and when it is needed. I will use epilepsy as the disease model because of its high rate of drug-resistance (30%) and will offer concrete opportunities for clinical transfer of such state-of-the-art technology. The clinical problem: Resective surgery is frequently the last option available to a patient with drug-resistant epilepsy (> 1 million persons in the EU). However, surgery fails in 30% of the cases and can have deleterious consequences with severe postoperative neurological deficits (impaired motor function, speech and memory). Furthermore, some cases of epilepsy are simply untreatable surgically because resective surgery would leave unacceptable damage to core functions. Clearly, a new therapeutic approach is needed when neurosurgery is not possible or deemed too risky. The OEIP solution: As I have demonstrated, OEIPs combine state-of-the-art organic electronics and pharmacology to control epileptiform activity in vitro by directly delivering inhibitory neurotransmitters on-demand. I additionally demonstrated that thin-film flexible organic electronics can be used to create minimally-invasive depth probes for implantation which significantly reduced tissue damage compared to standard rigid implants in vivo. I will integrate OEIPs on such probes creating devices which will have both the high-quality recordings provided by the organic electrodes for electrophysiological seizure detection and the molecular delivery capability of the OEIP for seizure intervention. The devices will be a closed-loop system to detect seizure onset and intervene in the affected brain region.

1 636 250 €

Start date: 2017-03-01, End date: 2022-02-28

During the last three decades, Islam has gained visibility in European public spheres through new religious symbols, but as well as new public figures, men and women, pious and secular who carry Islam in European public life. Islamic entry in the public sphere, and the claims for religious visibility provoke a series of debates on gender equality, freedom of expression and cultural (civilisational) differences in European publics. EUROPUBLICISLAM sets itself the intellectual research agenda of bringing together different fields of knowledge and analysis of the transformative forces that appear in the contemporary meeting of Islam and Europe. It proposes to develop an innovative understanding of the sporadic and at times violent ways in which Islam intervenes in the making of the European public sphere. EUROPUBLICISLAM engages with the European scholarly agenda on migration, the construction of a European public sphere, and Islam. It aims at shifting the contemporary theorization of Islam in Europe away from the integration and security paradigms, and towards a new theory of dynamics of interaction and mutual change. A new research field is marked out in combining and transforming the contemporary theorizations of European public sphere and European Islam. EUROPUBLICISLAM proposes to study religious symbols, artistic cultural productions and public figures affecting the everyday politics of cultural discord. It aims to re-conceptualize the place of Islam in the making of a European public sphere. An innovative methodology is proposed to study the constellations , the assemblages that bring together cultural differences in proximity and in confrontation across national public spheres, following a transnational dynamics. EUROPUBLICISLAM will thus contribute to the production of innovative research on the making and imaging a European public sphere where transformative cultural and aesthetic mixes and thus political pluralism are taking place.

1 414 645 €

Start date: 2008-12-01, End date: 2013-03-31