Our project addresses one of the main challenges of the “Digital agenda for Europe”, namely “Broadband: digital oxygen for all”. While this strategy is expected to have a significant social and economic impact, the huge instantaneous frequency band to be processed also leads to strong constraints, beyond the specifications of the state-of-the-art digital circuits. We propose a multidisciplinary approach that takes advantage of the capabilities and complementary aspects of wireless IR-UWB and UWB-over-fiber technologies to design intelligent, robust and high performance indoor wireless systems, for smart factories and perceptive cars. Thus, by associating UWB waveform optimization, cutting edge signal processing techniques and machine learning algorithms, these green low-cost systems should have the capability to jointly transmit high data rates and provide accurate indoor localization and tracking, as well as to recognize human physiological and behavioral patterns, like vital sign monitoring and gesture recognition. The project aims at increasing the safety, security and convenience in Industry 4.0 environments, by multi-humans discrimination/detection, localization and tracking, without the need for them to wear tags or any additional identification equipment. It also aims to contribute to the road safety by preventing the driver drowsiness related accidents and to facilitate the interaction with the perceptive car by hand gesture recognition. The fellowship will be hosted by the Lab-STICC Joint research unit CNRS 6285, which brings together the project supervisors from the University of Brest and ENIB. It will also benefits from an international collaboration with the Memorial University of Canada, and an industrial partnership with the ZF Friedrichshafen AG company.

A pesticide is defined as any substance used to kill, repel, or control certain forms of plant or animal life that are considered to be pests. They include herbicides for destroying weeds and other unwanted vegetation, insecticides for controlling a wide variety of insects, fungicides used to prevent the growth of molds, disinfectants for preventing the spread of bacteria, and rodenticides used to control mice and rats. Undoubtedly, the use of a wide range of pesticides has increased crop yields, controlled disease vectors and reduced postharvest losses. However, practically all pesticides are poisons and some of them pose long-term danger to the environment and humans through their persistence in nature and body tissue. Ideally a pesticide must be lethal to the targeted pests, but not to non-target species, including man. In the search for new alternatives, several researches paid attention towards the marine environment. Indeed, marine organisms are in constant competition with other species and any organism being able to produce compounds providing it with an evolutional advantage will prevail. Such products have been optimized through evolution to be highly efficient and represent as many opportunities for us, researchers, to develop "greener" tools to answer the increasing demand for environmentally respectful chemicals. The main goal of the project I propose is to assess the potential of specific marine organisms to produce prototype ecofriendly agrochemical agents, especially herbicides and fungicides, and to further evaluate the potential hits. In parallel, I will investigate the biosynthetic pathway of the natural compound as well as its ecological role towards other marine organisms. I envision to cover several cutting-edge areas both in fundamental and applied research, from bioprospection to ecotoxicology and including biological testing, chemical ecology and medicinal chemistry.

Atmospheric anoxia prevailed throughout the majority of Earth history, making oxygen and the animal life it supports relative newcomers to our planet. O2 accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere during two dramatic oxygenation events at ~2400 and ~600 million years ago (Ma). Both of these events were accompanied by profound biological and geochemical revolution, including the origin of animal life, making them amongst the most important events the Earth system has ever witnessed. Because the composition of Earth’s ancient atmosphere cannot be measured directly, its history must be examined using models constrained by geochemical proxies. The disappearance of sulfur isotope mass-independent fractionation (S-MIF) from the sedimentary record ca. 2320 Ma is considered the “smoking gun” evidence for the permanent oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere. However, it was recently suggested that weathering of older S-MIF bearing sediments resulted in a prolonged S-MIF “memory effect” that lasted ~200 Ma or more, thus obscuring the true history of atmospheric oxygenation. Here I propose new hypotheses to test, for the first time, the importance of the S-MIF memory effect at the onset of atmospheric oxygenation. I will evaluate specific sulfur, strontium, and oxygen isotope signals from exciting new samples obtained through a recent French drilling program to help resolve this fundamental problem in Earth system evolution. As an American Experienced Researcher, this Marie Curie project, ANOXIA-MEM, is designed to harmonize my unique isotope geochemistry skills with the knowledge, resources, and training capacity of two renowned French isotope laboratories for the maximum benefit of all parties. This project promises new tools and analyses that are uniquely poised to upset the prevailing paradigm for Earth’s atmospheric oxygenation.

This transregional and interdisciplinary research proposal analyses the impact of the shipworm epidemic on coastal societies along the North Sea in the eighteenth century. The shipworm is a mollusc that scavenges floating or submerged wood in a marine environment. Lodged in the wooden hulls of returning East Indiamen, the shipworm was brought to Europe around 1730. Within a few years the shipworm had destroyed man-made wooden structures all along the North Sea coast. North-Western Europe faced an ecological disaster; the Low Countries were on the brink of flooding as the shipworms destroyed the wooden dikes, expensive harbour infrastructure was damaged beyond repair and numerous ships had to receive new hulls in order to keep afloat. The implemented solutions and reforms to minimise the shipworm’s effects were manifold and often had far reaching consequences. As such the shipworm’s societal impact was wide-ranged, as it spawned – to name a few examples – religious fanaticism resulting in mass executions of homosexuals in the Dutch Republic, political reforms in the Southern Netherlands, scientific interest in marine biology, a new international balance of power and innovative techniques in ship hull optimisation. This study is based on archival research and on an interdisciplinary approach in collaboration with marine biologists and hydrodynamic engineers. This approach determines the degree of innovation in shipping and its resulting economic efficiency. Boards representing copper sheathed, tar coated and uncoated ship hulls will be contaminated with shipworms and subsequently tested in a towing tank to measure the ships’ water resistance. The shipworm epidemic was an environmental crisis that had a large impact on the North Sea area. Through analysing several case-studies this research aims to show how and why these societies reacted as they did, why some ended up in deadlock and why others were able to turn the tide and profit from this crisis through innovation.

The open ocean is the largest biome on Earth, yet it is the least protected. A major obstacle to its conservation lies in the fine-grained understanding of how marine organisms are affected by the ocean dynamics. In the last decades remote sensing and bio-logging drastically increased our understanding to how phytoplankton (that can be observed from space as ocean color) and large marine animals (that can be followed with sensors directly attached to them) responds to oceanic turbulence down to the mesoscale (few weeks-months, 10-100 km). A major knowledge gap still concerns the so-called "intermediate trophic levels" (ITLs, i.e. zooplankton and micronekton,) and how mesoscale currents (such as fronts and eddies) affect them. This is the focus of the MECODIHR project. The project uses an unprecedented combination of remote-sensing, and modelling on a multi-disciplinary in-situ database collected in the North-West Atlantic to identify patterns in the distribution of ITLs, relate them to physical structures and biogeochemical observations and make hypotheses about why such relationships arise. High-resolution state-of-the-art modelling allows to test the validity of the formulated hypotheses, clarify the mechanisms behind observed co-localisations and expand the extent of findings. High resolution in-situ measurements and modelling allows to approach how submesoscale dynamics (and its inter-seasonal variability) affect the distribution of ITLs. The MECODIHR results, acquired between the two multidisciplinary highly-reknown oceanographic laboratory of the University of Washington (outgoing phase : 2 years) and the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (incoming phase : 1 year), will provide critical information for open ocean conservation. The MECODIHR project will also train Dr. Della Penna with a rare combination of skills (including scientific, communicative, technical and transferable skills) that are fundamental to face the future challenges of marine sciences.