Imagine that you have just rung at a doorbell and no one has answered the door. Is there anybody home? How many times should you ring? One simple solution is just to ring several more times and wait. Yet, to save time and make sure that no one is home, you could also consider whether there is a light inside the house or whether there is a car parked in front. Although such situations are ubiquitous in our daily life, relatively little is known about how different decisions are implemented in the brain and how they flexibly inform behavior. This proposal directly aims to characterize decision variables both at the behavioral and neural levels to understand how the brain flexibly switches between them. We will combine sophisticated mice behaviors that accommodate multiple decision variables with innovative models of dynamical systems, and leverage the latest progress in electrophysiology and optogenetics to record and manipulate large ensembles of neurons simultaneously across multiple brain regions. This work will test the overarching hypothesis that the premotor cortex, thought to implement the intention to act, is a reservoir of decision variables that flexibly routes the employed decision variable to motor regions. Our highly multidisciplinary team, which consists of the researcher with productive records in systems neuroscience, the supervisor who is a specialist in cognitive neuropsychology, and the secondment supervisor who is a renowned theoretical neuroscientist, is well armed to successfully carry this project. Our results should deliver a new conceptual framework for understanding adaptive behaviors and their neural bases. This project will also provide a direct window into the neural mechanisms underlying individual variations in decision making and how actions may depart from a healthy behavior when erroneous or maladaptive strategies are used, of relevance for explaining diversity in human behavior and mental health.

This project aims to empower the researcher to develop novel knowledge and research skills to deconstruct the trade-off between labour and environmental sustainability, by analysing the implications of labour law with a critical societal problem: the global environmental crisis. This fellowship will develop a systemic and integrated approach to the legal analysis of forefront drivers of change in society, i.e. climate change and the need to promote a Just Transition to a low-carbon economy. By combining a variety of legal approaches and methods, it will contribute to advance and integrate the existing frontier research on labour and environmental sustainability, as well as to breach silos approaches to sustainable development and the correlated transitionary policies and legislations. This project will be implemented with a mix of traditional and innovative training activities (mostly training-through-research) based on individual and cooperative learning between the researcher and the supervisor. Paolo Tomassetti (the researcher) will carry out his fellowship at the Centre de droit social of Aix-Marseille University (the host institution), under the supervision of professor Alexis Bugada (the supervisor), for sixteen months. To ensure the overall quality of the project, in addition to three scientific publications, international conferences and a MOOC summer school, an Advisory Board will be established as a privileged audience of the project results and a multiplier of its dissemination through the scientific community.

During the past century, fossil-based hydrocarbons have been the main source of energy and chemicals, but in addition to be an unsustainable resource, they have led to important environmental concerns such as rising CO2 emissions. The great challenge for our societies is to develop alternative approaches for the sustainable production of energy and materials; the bioconversion of lignocellulosic biomass is one of them. Nevertheless, the physical and chemical recalcitrance of the biomass is the main obstacle to its cost-effective conversion as huge amounts of degrading enzymes are still required. Therefore, a significant improvement in enzymatic degradation is necessary, which involves enlarging the catalytic toolbox. By doing a large scale screening of the secretomes of a substantial fungal collection, the host organisation has shed light on the first member of a new family of lytic polysaccharide mono-oxygenases (LPMOs). LPMOs have been shown to boost the efficiency of cellulases industrial cocktails, thereby greatly reducing the financial and environmental penalties associated with the use of recalcitrant polysaccharides as a feedstock and, moreover, placing LPMOs at the center of considerable research interest. The objective of the ARTFUL project is the functional and structural characterization of the representative members of the new fungal LPMO family. The 6 years’ experience of the French fellow in the glycobiology field (biochemistry, enzymology, structural biology) combined with the expertise of Aix-Marseille University (France) in fungal omics form a solid basis that will be reinforce by the collaborations of experts. The quality of the hosting arrangements will maximise the training opportunities of the fellow and is suited for the two way transfer of knowledge. Acquired generated knowledge will provide a robust functional context to bioinformatic-based predictive biology as well as new enzymatic tools for subsequent industrial applications.

Phytoplankton, the tiny algae that fix carbon dioxide via photosynthesis, represent the base of the oceanic food chain and support essentially all life in the oceans. In the tropical Pacific, where phytoplankton biomass is low, local nutrient enrichments near islands support ecosystems characterized by higher biomass and biodiversity. While this "island effect" has been known for 60 years, the vast majority of islands remain unstudied and impacts at the basin scale are unknown. Additionally, little is known regarding changes in phytoplankton community structure despite implications for higher trophic levels. The SAPPHIRE project will elucidate the impact of islands on phytoplankton by conducting the first systematic study of the island effect in the tropical Pacific from a suite of physical and biological satellite data. This project leverages the OUTPACE in situ 20°S transect that sampled phytoplankton community composition nearby several islands in 2015 and the breakthrough satellite-based PHYSAT method that detects phytoplankton functional groups from space. Novel methods identifying and characterizing the island effect will be first developed in the OUTPACE region from in situ and satellite data, then applied to the entire tropical Pacific using satellite data. The ultimate goals are to 1) quantify the impact of islands on phytoplankton and physics in the tropical Pacific and 2) classify the islands as a function of enrichment processes and phytoplankton responses using cutting-edge machine learning techniques. SAPPHIRE provides a highly original perspective on marine ecological research by systematically conducting thousands of small-scale process studies over a large area, effectively providing a large-scale assessment of a mesoscale process. This project will be an important step in my career development by establishing me as a leading scientist in the emerging field of multidisciplinary data-intensive oceanography in Europe.