Expression of Interests

During development and throughout adult life, cell-fate diversity is in part generated via asymmetric cell divisions. Our team is studying how a cell divides to produce two daughter cells with different identities and how deregulation of asymmetric division is responsible for various types of pathologies, including cancers.Our research themes using invertebrate and vertebrate models combine approaches from genetics, cell biology and soft matter physics.

Contact:

Roland LE BORGNE

Ubiquitin, Proteasome, Protein-protein interaction, Systems biology, Proteomics

Our group investigates at the molecular level the function and regulation of the ubiquitin system. This system controls the activity and stability of the cellular proteome through the covalent modification of proteins by ubiquitin moieties, a process known as “ubiquitylation”. While proteomic experiments have shown that thousands of proteins can be the targeted by ubiquitylation, the great majority of ubiquitylation events remain uncharacterized. In particular, the enzyme that catalyse ubiquitylation have only been investigated for a very limited subset of ubiquitylated proteins. To address this question, we have devised a protein-fragment complementation assay, which enables us to investigate enzyme-substrate relationships in the ubiquitin system at the proteome level. We would like to apply this methodology to systematically investigate the substrates of SCF-family ubiquitin ligases. This will enable us to provide a comparative map of biological pathways targeted by these ubiquitin ligases.

Contact:

Gwenael RABUT – gwenael.rabut@univ-rennes1.fr

Keywords: Muscle, Satellite Cells, Stem Cells, Drosophila, Regeneration

Muscle stem (satellite) cells (MuSCs) ensure the functional homeostasis of skeletal muscles as well as their regeneration upon injury. The project goal is to understand how MuSCs sense signals provided by their environment and engage a series of dramatic changes in cellular organization and fate, to repair the muscles. We would like take the advantage of newly designed Drosophila transgenic tools and imaging approaches to track MuSCs in vivo and identify genes regulating their behaviors.

Contact: The muscle Development and Repair team

Hadi BOUKHATMI – hadi.boukhatmi@univ-rennes1.fr

Team: Gene Expression and Development

Controls of gene expression exerted at the RNA level are instrumental for the development of vertebrate embryos. This includes alternative splicing, mRNA translation and decay. Our group uses a diversity of in vivo (Xenopus, mice), in cellulo (2D and 3D cultures) and in vitro models. We focus on the contributions of defective controls of RNA regulations in two human pathologies:

(i) Cataract: ocular lens clouding, the leading cause of blindness worldwide. We investigate how RNA regulations impact the organisation of the cytoskeleton, to confer the lens fiber cells their specific shape. Ultimately this peculiar organisation is required for lens transparency. We investigate how defective RNA controls lead to cataract.

(ii) Head and neck squamous cell carcinomas. We investigate how the synthesis of splice isoforms of transcription factors is controlled, and how these different isoforms affect cell properties.

Contact:

Pr Luc PAILLARD – luc.paillard@univ-rennes1.fr

The research team investigates biological processes that governs brain establishment during early steps of development. We focus on neurodevelopmental disorders to establish their causes at molecular and cellular levels. Our goal is to use the brain organoid technology to study physiopathology of congenital brain disorders related to Sonic Hedgehog-deficiency. It aims to propose a new molecular diagnostic tool to the patient suffering from this pathology by creating a reference transcriptomic identity card of iPSC derived forebrain organoids recapitulating the forebrain spectrum disorder.

Contact:

Valérie DUPE – valerie.dupe@univ-rennes1.fr

Many actors are now involved in ecological and energy transitions in rural areas. The research currently being conducted proposes to study the ways in which these transitions are taking place in these territories, the associated games of actors and power, and the new balances or imbalances that are emerging, in terms of production activities, but also in terms of inequalities in the territories. More specifically, research is already underway within the team on two themes: 1/ the development of the biogas sector in France, and more broadly on the diversification of farmers’ production linked to transitions, and 2/ the definition of a more ecological social protection in France and in Southeast Asia and the way in which social protection actors can position themselves in this context. This work is being carried out by economists in particular, but in close collaboration with other disciplinary fields, notably sociology, geography and political science.

Contact:

Alexandre BERTHE – alexandre.berthe[at]univ-rennes2.fr

Keywords: Biological invasions, Community dynamics, Eco-evolutionary feedbacks, Ecosystem stability, Rapid evolution, Trophic interactions.

Biological invasions often entail deep reorganizations in the trophic structure of native communities, with ramifications to the function and stability of the whole ecosystem. Anticipating and managing these ramifications requires gaining a better understanding of how recipient communities respond to biological invasions. In particular, trophic reorganizations may alter selective pressures and drive rapid evolution of trophic phenotypes of both native and invasive species which, through iterative eco-evolutionary feedbacks, may ultimately change the strength and direction of trophic interactions. To decipher these complex mechanisms, our team uses a combination of high-frequency ecosystem monitoring (flow-through microscopy, multispectral aerial surveys, automated image analysis), molecular and quantitative genetics, mark-recapture and modelling approaches on the field (pond networks), in mesocosms and in the laboratory.

Contact:

Eric EDELINE

Keywords: Metagenomics, Prokaryotes, Hydrothermal/geothermal ecosystems, Sulfur disproportionation

Our team investigates microbial metabolisms in extreme habitats such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents and geothermal hot springs. Currently, we have two main projects. One is focused on the understanding of microbial sulfur disproportionation from the molecular to the ecosystem level. For this project, we would be interested to investigate the history of this metabolism with respect to sulfate-reduction. Our second project is focused on the microbial communities of the geothermal and hydrothermal zones of the Kerguelen archipelago and St Paul Island. These areas are located more than 3000 km from the first inhabited areas and are thus very little anthropized. The microbial communities they host have been the subject of only a few studies and remain largely unknown. We would be interested to uncover metabolic pathways to phenotypic traits of the Bacteria and Archaea from the 30 main sites, using metagenomics.

Contact:

Karine ALAIN – Karine.Alain@univ-brest.fr –

Tel. (+33) (0)2 98 49 88 53 – K. Alain CV : https://www.univ-brest.fr/menu/recherche-innovation/pages-chercheurs/ALAIN-Karine//CV.cid66547

* European Institute for Marine Studies (IUEM) – BEEP Biology and Ecology of deep-sea Ecosystems UMR6197 CNRS-UBO-Ifremer (formerly LM2E Laboratory of Microbiology of the Extreme Environments)

Genetic, inflammatory or pathogenic disorders, as well as aging, can all induce intestinal microvillus atrophy, causing food malabsorption and diarrhoea associated with severe morbidity. However, intestinal microvillus growth and stability during normal development or in pathological contexts has been mostly investigated in vitro. We take advantage of live super-resolution microscopy and endogenously expressed probes to molecularly characterize C. elegans inherited, acquired or acute microvillus atrophy models and then identify and characterize new regeneration mechanisms.

Contact:

Grégoire MICHAUX

Keywords: RIbosome ; cryo-EM ; toxins ; tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the causative agent of tuberculosis, the leading cause of death due to a single infectious agent, causing more than 1.5 million deaths per year. To survive in the host, protein synthesis (translation) is tightly regulated in Mtb. This is performed by various quality control factors, including ribosome dependent toxins. Although their cellular functions are still largely unknown, many of these systems are strongly induced in response to stress, e.g. drug exposure, hypoxia, eat shock or DNA damage. We want to focus our studies on the structural aspects of new atypical quality control and TA systems impacting the ribosome. Our main objectives are to get structural insights into the binding of these factors to isolated ribosomes and to solve the structure of the complexes in solution by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM).

Contact:

Reynald GILLET – reynald.gillet@univ-rennes1.fr

Keywords: Digital Revolution ; Digital Twins ; Industry 4.0 ; Agro-food Industry ; Decision Support Tools ; Data Analytics/Mining ; Smart Manufacturing

The research team aims to address issues that participate in the acceleration of the digital transition of the French industry and aspires to accompany various economic actors in this process.

The University of Southern Brittany is building a rich and varied ecosystem around the DT, bringing together expertise from different fields to address multidimensional research tracks related to the DT in order to bring it to maturity (Generic models and architectures for DTs, Acceptability and cooperation with DT, proof of concepts and collaborations with industrial partners, etc.).

The aim is to make the Lab-STICC and the Brittany region a pole of competitiveness in France and Europe for DT, by having a wide spectrum of expertise to put to good use for this new transverse technology. This does not prevent us from addressing local challenges, as agro-food related issues, that represents a very important part of the region’s industrial fabric which offers great opportunities for collaboration.

Contact:

Laboratoire des Sciences et Techniques de l’Information de la Communication et de la Connaissance (Lab-STICC)

Mohammed Adel HAMZAOUI – mohammed.hamzaoui@univ-ubs.fr

ENSIBS website: https://www-ensibs.univ-ubs.fr/fr/index.html

SCAP Factory of the Future platform website: https://www-ensibs.univ-ubs.fr/fr/ecole/equipements-ateliers-2/scap-industrie.html

Keywords: Fishing geography – Fishing fleets – Fish value chains – Coastal places – Brexit

Within an international team (France, UK, Germany) building the Brexfish project “Fishing Places and Sustainable Transitions”, post-doctoral fellows are welcome to contribute to social science debates and literature on fishing and coastal issues. We are exploring, from theoretical and empirical approaches, how fishing people, places and enterprises in north-west Europe have experienced and responded to Brexit as part of longer-term political-economic and environmental transition. Within this collaboration, we are planning to examine 1/ changes in access to UK offshore waters, focusing on the ports of Lorient (Brittany) and Newlyn (Cornwall), which are home to significant corporate offshore fishing fleets (Scapêche in Lorient and Stevenson’s in Newlyn) and 2/ the effects of changed market access on fish value chains, including export-oriented shellfish fisheries in Cardigan Bay, Pembrokeshire (Wales) and Cornwall, fin fish sales through local fish markets in Cornwall and shellfish and fin fish value chains in Pays de Cornouaille (Brittany) and Port-en-Bessin and related ports (Normandy).

Contact:

Catherine LAIDIN – catherine.laidin@agrocampus-ouest.fr

Yvon LE CARO – yvon.lecaro@univ-rennes2.fr

The research activity of Hybrid team belongs to the field of Virtual Reality and 3D interaction with Virtual Environments. Our objective is to invent novel 3D interactive techniques with virtual environments exploiting both the body and brain of the user. We focus on novel user inputs in virtual reality such as coming from full-body tracking or brain-computer interfaces. Applications of our research program are for industry (virtual prototyping), medicine (surgical simulation, rehabilitation and reeducation), design (architectural mock-up), art or videogames and entertainment. Hybrid was created in January 2013.

We are looking to work further on avatars. Avatars, i.e. digital representations of the users, are more and more present in Virtual Reality/Extended Reality applications. Their use is raising strong research challenges regarding novel devices and immersive displays, multi-sensory rendering algorithms, 3D human-computer interaction techniques, and perceptual models and phenomena.

Contact:

Anatole LECUYER – anatole.lecuyer@inria.fr

The research activity of Hybrid team belongs to the field of Virtual Reality and 3D interaction with Virtual Environments. Our objective is to invent novel 3D interactive techniques with virtual environments exploiting both the body and brain of the user. We focus on novel user inputs in virtual reality such as coming from full-body tracking or brain-computer interfaces. Applications of our research program are for industry (virtual prototyping), medicine (surgical simulation, rehabilitation and reeducation), design (architectural mock-up), art or videogames and entertainment. Hybrid was created in January 2013.

We are looking to work further on brain-computer interfaces and neuro-feedback for rehabilitation. Brain-computer interfaces rely on measuring directly the cerebral activity of the users for interacting with automated systems. Such “mental” interfaces can be used for brain rehabilitation, eg after stroke, by providing direct “neurofeedback”. This is raising strong challenges in terms of real-time brain signal processing (EEG data), and novel human-computer interaction schemes exploiting for instance multi-sensory feedbacks.

Contact:

Anatole LECUYER – anatole.lecuyer@inria.fr

The transmission of viral diseases is more than ever a major global health concern. The persistence of a number of emerging viruses in the male genital tract and their transmission through semen represents a major challenge for the control of viral dissemination and reproductive health. The UrGenT team (40 people) is a renowned leader in the fields of viral infections and genomics of the human genital tract. One of our main aim is to decipher the mechanisms underlying the persistence of emerging viruses in the testis, with a focus on the role of innate immunity, and to develop predictive models. The team has a unique expertise in ex vivo models of human genital tissues combined with innovative genomic approaches such as single cell RNAseq. The UrGenT team provides a dynamic multidisciplinary research environment for impactful research and career development by talented individuals.

Contact

Nathalie DEJUCQ-RAINSFORD – Nathalie.dejucq-rainsford@inserm.fr

Deep learning based multimodal representations received a lot of attention recently. This has been motivated by their extraordinary ability to facilitate getting insight from the multimedia collections they represent as they convey comprehensive and rich information about elements existing in the real world and captured through various kind of media such as text, images, video, audio, … Deep learning methods, however, are very sensitive to adversarial attacks, to poisoning, to backdoor attacks, etc. Whereas that sensitivity has been rather well explored for medias taken in isolation (adversarial images ; adversarial audio, …), few studies are concerned with multimodal adversarial attacks. Are multimodal representations inherently more robust or are they weaker than uni-modal ones? Should all modalities be attacked to produce an adversarial sample? If not, is there a weakest modality?

Contact

Laurent AMSALEG – http://people.rennes.inria.fr/Laurent.Amsaleg/ – laurent.amsaleg@irisa.fr

The South-African East Coast coastal ecosystem lies landward of the Agulhas Current, one of the most intense Western Boundary Currents in the world’s oceans. The latter follows a southward along-shore path, with speeds commonly exceeding 1.5 m s-1. Between 30° S and 34°S, this path is occasionally disturbed by mesoscale coherent features such as Natal pulses (large solitary cyclonic meanders travelling all the way down to the Agulhas Bank), and semi-permanent cyclonic cold core Durban eddies. The latter will be surveyed during the RESILIENCE cruise in April/May 2022 on board RV Marion Dufresnes. Physical and biological data will be collected at fine scale to characterize the physical processes at play in linking together the very contrasted nutrient-rich coastal waters and the oligotrophic opens-seas waters. Candidates wishing to participate in the analysis of this cruise data with an innovative approach may contact us.

Contact:

Steven HERBETTE – Team Océan Côtier – steven.herbette@univ-brest.fr

Keywords: Mutagenesis, Bacteria, Biofilm, Overexpression

The research thematic of LBCM* is the dynamic of biofilm formation and bioprotection. One axis is focusing on the link between biofilm and virulence. Biofilms are defined as organized bacterial community, embedded in a matrix and capable of persisting in most of environments. It can thus be a reservoir of pathogenic bacteria and a source of antibiotic resistance genes spread. We recently discovered a Pseudoalteromonas strain producing a small antibiofilm protein, we called it Alterocin. We want to understand molecular mechanisms involved in Alterocin production. Alterocin could be a great advance in infectious medicine to minimize biofilm formation of pathogenic bacteria without the use of antibiotics.

Contact:

Alexis BAZIRE – alexis.bazire@univ-ubs.fr

* Laboratoire de Biotechnologies et Chimie Marines, European Institute for Marine Studies (IUEM) –EA3884. Université Bretagne Sud

Advanced composite materials, such as carbon fibre-reinforced polymers, are becoming popular in the maritime industry, where most of ships are still built with steel.

Avenues are clearly open for lightening ships with these materials, which would allow drastic reduction in fuel consumption and polluting emissions.

Still, several obstacles remain to be overcome to enable them to fully meet the ecological challenges of the maritime sector. Besides, their manufacturing is an arduous task.

Automated manufacturing of composite parts is a promising way for addressing these issues, reducing arduousness of work and generation of manufacturing waste. Moreover, the racing yachts are bold industries that create innovation, later used in maritime transport of passengers and goods.

Our aim is to develop tailored composite materials in terms of specific mechanical properties, additive manufacturing, waste reduction, innovative design and computer simulation.

Contact:

Pr. Vincent KERVYRIN Vincent.keryvin@univ-ubs.fr

Keywords: food digestion; proteolysis; proteomics; dynamics modelling; large data set

A perfect understanding of the digestion process is a prerequisite in order to think food design to specific nutritional targets. However, food digestion is a very complex process, not yet fully understood. The complexity of food digestion lies in the succession of very different phases, and in the complexity of each phase itself. With respect to protein digestion, several proteases are involved, the “operating rules” of which are still incompletely known. Especially, the dynamic dimension of proteolysis is rarely considered, while dynamics is a major characteristic of the digestion process. In an interdisciplinary approach combining the expertise of two research units, in food digestion, protein biochemistry and proteomics on the one hand, and in statistics and data science on the other, we develop innovative methods to investigate this issue. Questions we propose to explore are about inference on peptide filiation throughout digestion based on Mass Spectrometry data and on the influential physicochemical and structural features.

Contact

David Causeur – UMR IRMAR CNRS – Institut Agro Rennes-Angers – david.causeur@agrocampus-ouest.fr

Françoise Nau – UMR STLO INRAE-Institut Agro Rennes-Angers – francoise.nau@agrocampus-ouest.fr

Keywords : cybersecurity, hardware design, embedded systems

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems are massively spreading in critical infrastructures such as transport, factories or smart cities. Such devices rely on both small software and hardware components to process and communicate information. They manipulate sensitive data leading to strict security needs. Moreover, these systems are more and more connected to an IT (information technology) network increasing the overall attack surface. This enables new opportunities to breach the global security of infrastructures. Our research group propose, design and evaluate original hardware or mixed (hardware/software) solutions for protecting embedded systems against both software and physical attacks. Software attacks exploit vulnerable code pieces in order to retrieve sensitive information or to perform malicious actions. Contrary to software attacks, physical attacks require a physical access to the target, which is very often easy for embedded systems, in order to retrieve sensitive information through side-channel attacks (SCAs) or to modify its internal state through fault injection attacks (FIAs).

Contact

Guy Gogniat – guy.gogniat@univ-ubs.fr

Vianney Lapôtre – vianney.lapotre@univ-ubs.fr

Keywords:  deep learning accelerators, hardware security, fault attacks, countermeasures, fault tolerance

Recent studies show how to use side-channels to guess key parameters or inputs from DL models running on accelerators. For example, input images of a model were estimated from power traces. However, we would like to go further than current practice by studying if private information can be retrieved during the training phase or if it is possible to disrupt the training quality by attacking the accelerators. Our objective is to study training-time hardware attacks and required countermeasures, focusing on fault injections in edge devices and remote side-channel attacks to cloud accelerators.

Contact

Olivier Sentieys – olivier.sentieys@inria.fr – http://people.rennes.inria.fr/Olivier.Sentieys/

Spear phishing is a very frequent and effective type of social engineering attack where the victim receives one of more seemingly friendly emails in which the attacker impersonates a colleague or hierarchically higher standing person and asks for a favor or service. We are planning to work on the detection of spear phishing attacks through natural language processing/text mining methods, based on a cognitive model of a generic attack: the persuasion tactics of the attacker, the parameters of perception and the attention failures by the victim. In particular, the context of reception of the attacking messages will be part of the model together with linguistic and paralinguistic information. We are working in an interdisciplinary way (natural language processing, cognitive science, cybersecurity) and with Vade Inc., a company specialized in cybersecurity with an extremely large corpus of email flows.

Contact

Yannis Haralambous – yannis.haralambous@imt-atlantique.fr

Philippe Lenca – philippe.lenca@imt-atlantique.fr

Keywords: Rule Mining; Knowledge Bases; How-Provenance

How-provenance annotations are expressions that explain how a particular unit of data, e.g., a query answer, was produced from other data units. In databases, they allow for applications such as dynamic query updates. We are interested in this case because annotations can speed-up the re-evaluation of the scores for patterns mined on dynamic data, incurring also less energy consumption. While we are open to explore this research avenue in a broad sense, i.e., for different types of patterns, we are particularly interested in Horn rule mining on large and dynamic knowledge graphs.

Contact:

Luis Galárraga – luis.galarraga@inria.fr – http://luisgalarraga.de

Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) model a large number of applications where an artificial agent chooses an action at each iteration and receives a random reward which depends on this action. The agent’s objective is to maximize the rewards received over time. This setting covers, by example, the choice of news displayed on a web page, or of recommended videos, or even of a journey going from position A to position B.

We are interested by practical MAB algorithms dedicated to specific applications while being theoretically grounded. We especially enjoy settings which boil down to identifying the K most attractive items.

Contact

Elisa Fromont – elisa.fromont@irisa.fr – http://people.irisa.fr/Elisa.Fromont/

Romaric Gaudel – romaric.gaudel@ensai.fr – https://sites.google.com/site/romaricgaudel/

Keywords: Explainable AI, Pattern mining, Neural Network debugging, Conterfactual explanations, Post-hoc explanations

We would like to explain (and potentially act on) the bad decisions (e.g. missclassifications) taken by neural networks. One axis could be to use/learn/construct global (counter-factual) explanations to identify particular problems in the data related to groups of examples (i.e. missclassified examples from the same class) that could, in turn, be used to improve the accuracy of the system.  Another axis could be to use data mining tools to extract meaningful pattern in trained networks (i.e. activation maps per layer) and try to understand if parts of the network can be responsible for particular mistakes.

Elisa Fromont – elisa.fromont@irisa.fr – http://people.irisa.fr/Elisa.Fromont/

Keywords: Electronic structure simulation, DFT, Neuronal Networks, statistical physics analysis

Monolayers based on carbon, boron or other light elements are good candidate to store hydrogen molecules that could latter served in fuel cells. Most of the systems must be doped in order to reach a reasonable gravimetric content of hydrogen molecules that meet the standard defined by the American department of energy. The weight of hydrogen molecule with respect to the overall system must exceed 5.5 at weight percentage and the adsorption of the molecule must enter a narrow window of energy in the range 0.4-0.15 eV. Lots of publications have recently issued on this research item and one is amazed by the abundance of promising systems with potentially high hydrogen molecule content. Though promising these systems are hardly explored with respect to the addition of pressure or of external constraints. With the help of large computing facilities and the possibility of a “secondment” at the University of Valladolid we would like to recruit a fellow candidate highly talented and experienced with electronic structure simulations and the use of neuronal networks.

Contact

Alexandre LEBON – alexandre.lebon@univ-brest.fr

At the Laboratoire des Sciences de l’Environnement MARin (Plouzané), we are interested in the study of marine trace metal cycles. Some of these metals being key nutrients for the phytoplankton, they strongly influence the structure of marine ecosystem and the carbon drawdown through the biological pump. In this context, we perform many laboratory experiments to study processes involved, using or state-of-the art cleanrooms. We also participate to many ocenaographic cruises in various parts of the worlds oceans (Southern Ocean, North Atlantic), many of which falling under the umbrella of the international GEOTRACES program.

Contact

Hélène Planquette – helene.planquette@univ-brest.fr

Keywords: Structural mechanics, strength of materials, instabilities, multi-scale behavior, symmetries

I am interested in developing efficient tools to study complex materials with internal microstructure such as composites, cellular, architected or hierarchical materials, using new theoretical methodologies and advanced numerical simulations.

Contact

Christelle COMBESCURE – christelle.combescure@univ-ubs.fr

Keywords: intestinal physiology, mitochondrial function, oxidative stress, nutrition, microbiota

Overweight and obesity comorbidities are strongly linked to low-grade inflammation. While the adipose tissue is a key tissue in fueling inflammation in obesity, the role of western diet-induced dysbiosis and alteration of intestinal homeostasis as a driver of low-grade inflammation has also emerged. Intestinal barrier function encompasses several mechanisms, from maintenance of low epithelial permeability to mucus and anti-microbial peptides secretion and constant renewal of epithelial cells, that are costly in energy. Within intestinal epithelial cells, energy is produced by mitochondria, in the form of ATP via oxidative phosphorylation, conferring a pivotal role to this organelle in the maintenance of intestinal homeostasis. However, mitochondrial function in intestinal epithelial cells is likely to be impaired by western diet consumption notably through nutrients, such as fatty acids, or metabolites produced by the gut microbiota, that may act as metabolic perturbators of epithelial cells. The aim of our project is to study the role played by mitochondria in diet-induced alteration of gut homeostasis, using in vivo (mouse models) and in vitro (cell lines, intestinal organoids) approaches and test different dietary and/or pharmacological approaches targeting the mitochondria to prevent or restore intestinal homeostasis in obesity.

Contact

Gaëlle BOUDRY gaelle.boudry@inrae.fr

Annaïg LAN annaig.an@agroparistech.fr

Keywords: Innovation, Management, Planetary boundaries, Sustainability

Low-techs, eco-innovation, sustainable innovation, frugal innovation: in the past decades, several concepts have emerged to describe and to support innovations that integrate ecological considerations. The idea is to reduce the environmental impact of innovations throughout their life-cycle, from their conception to their end-of-life disposal or their re-use.

Because of current ecological issues, however, there is a pressing need to go one step further: it is necessary not only to improve innovations’ sustainability relatively to prior performance, but to make sure that innovations are in line with planetary boundaries all over their life-cycle – and thus genuinely respect the environment’s natural limits. How to promote and to manage such innovative processes? Candidates interested in examining any aspects of this topic are welcome!

Contact

Matthieu MANDARD – matthieu.mandard[@]univ-rennes1.fr

Keywords Mucosal immunity; microbiota; MAIT cells; gnotobiology; colitis; mouse models

We study the biology of microbe-specific T lymphocytes called Mucosa-Associated Invariant T (MAIT) cells, with a focus on the question of how they interact with the microbiota. MAIT cells are abundant in humans and are programmed to respond quickly upon stimulation, making them attractive targets for clinical intervention. MAIT cell antigens are metabolites derived from the vitamin B2 pathway, absent from animal cells but present in most bacteria and yeasts. Both the receptor and the MHC molecule presenting antigens for MAIT cells are highly conserved in evolution, suggesting important – yet unclear – functions. We reported that microbiota-derived antigens control the development of MAIT cells in the thymus, revealing an intimate relationship between MAIT cells and the microbiota (Legoux et al, Science 2019). Unpublished results also indicate that MAIT cells protect the host during intestinal inflammation. Further research will aim at understanding the dynamics and the role of MAIT antigens in vivo and will explore the mechanism of action of MAIT cells in the gut.

Contact

François LEGOUX

Alpha-cyanobacteria, a monophyletic group encompassing Prochlorococcus, the smallest photosynthetic organism on Earth, and three deep Synechococcus-like lineages, are the most abundant and ubiquitous photosynthetic prokaryotes in aquatic ecosystems and contribute to a large part of global net primary productivity. This ecological success as well as the numerous genomes, omic data, cultures and the availability of genetic tools make a-cyanobacteria highly pertinent models in microbial ecology. In this context, the ECOMAP team of the Biological Station of Roscoff is expecting to grant a postdoctoral fellow with experience in bioinformatics modeling and/or molecular biology to work on species concept in alpha-cyanobacteria and on the links between phylogenomic diversification and colonization of specific environmental niches.

Contact

Laurence GARCZAREK – laurence.garczarek[@]sb-roscoff.fr

UMR Adaptation and Diversity in the Marine Environement (AD2M) – ECOMAP team

Keywords Production planning, scheduling and distribution via machine learning and preference-based optimization

In the context of the fourth industrial revolution, which seeks to interconnect sensors, data and systems that make decisions autonomously, increasingly larger amounts of data are collected in order to support decision making at all levels of an organization. In many cases, the decision objects correspond to production planning and scheduling scenarios, machine setup, personnel planning, logistics, etc. and need to be constructed using complex and time consuming algorithms. Furthermore, the impacts of selecting a solution can span across multiple and often conflicting criteria, making their choice non trivial.

The construction of solutions to difficult problems characterized by multiple objectives falls within the field of Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) while the selection of alternatives characterized by multiple conflicting criteria falls within that of Multi-Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA). Our main interests lie in the integration of preferences within MOO and boosting optimization approaches using machine learning (ML) and/or artificial intelligence (AI). Furthermore, we are in contact with several industrial partners, some in the context of constructing planning and scheduling solutions, others in the context of constructing distribution networks. Hence, we are able to test the proposed solutions using realistic data.

Contact

Marc SEVAUX – marc.sevaux[@]univ-ubs.fr

Alexandru OLTEANU – alexandru.olteanu[@]univ-ubs.fr

Othonè project International group

We study the most recent and upcoming issues in digital edition and shape the future of digital publication. Research areas include study of new interfaces and reading experience, artificial intelligence for digital publishing, upcoming standards, interoperability, sustainability and accessibility, in line with the FAIR standard. PhD in computer sciences, media and information studies, design and marketing, as well as literature, history, history of art and history of sciences, are especially encouraged to get in touch and apply!

Contact

Christophe SCHUWEY  – christophe.schuwey[@]univ-ubs.fr

KEYWORDS : arts, public space, experimentation, collaborative practices, societal issues, temporary occupation, third space, materiality, performance.

There are 12 research units in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences affiliated with CAPS https://creativepublicspace.univ-rennes.fr/recherche.html CAPS is a Rennes-based Graduate School welcoming research into the following topics: – artistic practices in public space; the researcher’s role in practice-led research and artistic research – socially or politically-engaged research, the socio-environmental transition – the dynamics of urban and rural territories; wastelands and shrinking centres – methodological cross-overs, transdisciplinary approaches on public action and public engagement ; research as experimentation through artistic practices or participatory research.

Contact : creativepublicspace@univ-rennes.fr Taylor Still, International coordinator taylor.still@univ-rennes2.fr

The laboratory of ocean physics and remote sensing (LOPS) of IUEM has a multidecadal expertise in ocean dynamics theory, measurements at sea of physical parameters, analysis and interpretation of measurements and numerical modeling of ocean physics.
In this laboratory, a team is devoted to Ocean scale interactions. This team investigates in particular vortex and wave dynamics, effects of topography, forcing/coupling with the atmosphere and the cryosphere.
Pr Xavier Carton belongs to this team and proposes a post-doctoral study on the impact of atmosphere-ocean coupling on mesoscale and submesoscale vortex dynamics with application to
the North Brazil Current region. Theory, numerical modeling and data analysis will be used to achieve this study.
In particular we will use the oceanic and atmospheric data of the international EUREC4A experiment of 2020. We also have simple coupled models (QG/SQG) and a realistic PE model of the Atlantic ocean.

Contact

Pr Xavier CARTON – xcarton[@]univ-brest.fr / tel. 33/0-290915509

To promote sustainable development and socio-ecological responsibility, we aim to propose powerful tools for industrials to integrate natural fibers into higher performance applications. The idea is to balance the benefits of flax fibers, that provide an excellent damping capacity, and carbon fibers, the stiffest amongst synthetic ones, through a hybrid reinforcement of thermoplastic matrices, that provide thermoformability and heat-weldability properties and are recyclable and reusable in 3D printing process for time, cost and waste reduction.
Our strategy consists in developing a numerical high-fidelity model to investigate the vibratory behavior of the bio-based hybrid composite and optimize the impact of the laminate design variables in order to balance the benefits of both fibers and achieve the best possible performance regarding cost/weight, damping, stiffness, and ultimate properties.

Contact

Khaoula Chikhaoui khaoula.chikaoui[@]univ-ubs.fr

Laetitia Duigou laetitia.duigou[@]univ-ubs.fr

Jean-Marc Cadou jean-marc.cadou[@]univ-ubs.fr

Keywords: virus, soil microbiology, biotic interactions, biogeochemical cycles, metagenomics

Phages, viruses infecting bacteria, are the most abundant biological entities on earth, playing a key role in shaping the bacterial communities and consequently influencing nutrient cycling. While their ecology and functional roles have been widely studied in aquatic systems, phage-bacteria interactions in soils and their resulting significance to microbial-driven processes remain poorly understood. While soil phages may have the potential to dictate the magnitude and direction of CO2 emissions, a greenhouse gas, by attacking bacteria involved in the carbon cycle, very limited information about phage-bacteria interactions in soils is available and soil viral ecology is still poorly understood. In this context, I run research to decipher phage-bacteria interactions in soils from wetlands and their consequences on SOM dynamics.

Contact

Cécile MONARD – cecile.monard[@]univ-rennes1.fr

The Computational Social Science team at IMT Atlantique, campus Brest, aims to develop an observatory of online community dynamics, proposing a software platform and inter-disciplinary methodologies. Researchers in Computer Science and Social Sciences meet around the analysis of data from social media, in order to describe and model, among others, the phenomena of interaction, self-organization and production of commons, e.g. collaborative content creation, information diffusion, fake news detection, deviant behaviours, lifetime of communities, spatio-temporal patterns, anomaly detection, etc. Machine Learning and AI are particularly mobilized to understand content (NLP, Transfer Learning) but also organizations or modes of interaction between Internet users (Complex Networks, GAN, GNN, etc.).

Contact

Cécile Bothorel cecile.bothorel[@]imt-atlantique.fr

Inna Lyubareva, Nicolas Jullien, Laurent Brisson

The consumption of more environmentally friendly products is a central issue in sustainable development strategies. Understanding consumers’ motivations is therefore one of the challenges of policies for sustainable diet. When it comes to environmental considerations it is important to consider the separability between the place of production and consumption. Depending on the stage generating environmental damage, consumer motivations to take it into consideration can to various degrees be linked to environmental, health or social motivations. In the case of seafood, the production may induce several environmental damages (stocks, impact on habitat, bycatch). Furthermore, a large share of the wild fish consumed in France is imported products, implying pollution from transportation. At the other end, there are large exporting countries for fish products like Norway. Through quantitative survey methods, this research aims at exploring the motivation of Norwegian and French consumers. We will look at the impact of the distance between consumption and production on the motivations of seafood consumers (environmental, health or social motivations)

Contact

Sterenn LUCAS – sterenn.lucas[@]agrocampus-ouest.fr

Keywords (in French): romans, romans épistolaires, première personne, littérature, lumières, XVIIIe siècle, altérité

I am specialized in 18th century literature, especially novels, first-person novels and epistolary novels. My two thematic fields are subaltern voices in novels and the relationship betweeen economics and fiction on this period. But I am competent to supervise a wide range of subjects (novels, history of ideas and theatre) between 1700 and 1800, with a preference for the period 1700-1770.

Contact

Prof. Florence Magnot-Ogilvy florence.magnot-ogilvy[@]univ-rennes2.fr

Keywords: molecule diffusion,intracellular dynamics, statistical models, estimation, particle tracking, fluorescence microscopy

Understanding the molecular interactions and intracellular transport mechanisms in space and time is central in fundamental cell biology to characterize cellular functions, and crucial to the treatment and cure of human disease. In this context, the modeling, classification, and estimation of diffusion processes has known a growing interest in statistics, biophysics, and biology with the popularization of fluorescence dynamical microscopy and super-resolution imaging. Our objective is to build statistical methods and algorithms to analyze molecular mobility and diffusion from microscopy data and stochastic motion models, as well to quantify interactions between molecular species and cytoskeleton components.

Contact:

Charles Kervrann – charles.kervrann[@]inria.fr

Plastics are omnipresent in our daily life and the increasing production leads to a growing contamination of the environment. In contrast to the aquatic system, its impact on soil organisms and soil function needs to be better understood, in particular as farming activities progressively use it. Earthworms are soil ecosystem engineers with key functions for the soil (agro)-ecosystem, and their ingestion of soil renders them highly vulnerable for the uptake of plastic debris, possibly including secondary contamination. The team offers experiences with investigating harmful impacts from the molecular to the life trait level in earthworms and other species. Moreover, soil characteristics affecting fertility or other soil ecosystem services can be assessed within the network. Increasingly important are field studies, and plastic contaminated experimental sites can be included in the project.

Contact

Prof. Claudia Wiegand Claudia.wiegand[@]univ-rennes1.fr

Speckle field analysis is an effective tool for the study of microscopic processes in biological media. Speckle is generated when coherent light is scattered by a rough surface at the wavelength scale (or much larger), or by suspended particles in a liquid medium. The resulting speckle images show a random spatial distribution of intensity with bright and dark spots, resulting from interferences of the scattered light. The dynamic and spatial characteristics of the observed phenomenon are directly related to the physical properties of the studied sample. Our research team (OPTIMAG – Optics team) has already exploited the potential of this method in various fields, such as agriculture, for the monitoring of fruit ripening or the optical characterisation of a biopesticide, odontology, for the early diagnosis of dental erosion or for monitoring the hardening kinetics of dental cements, or oenology, for determining the origin of a wine. Our purpose is now to develop medical applications of speckle field analysis in collaboration with clinicians from our Institute (IBSAM – Brest Institute in Health, Agronomy and Materials), for example for the detection of diseases causing changes in the constitution of biological fluids (human blood coagulation, semen hyperviscosity, …).

Contact

Guy LE BRUN – Guy.LeBrun@univ-brest.fr