Dr. Patrick is Professor of Pediatrics at the University Paris-Descartes, Chief of Pediatric Neurology Department at the Hospital Saint-Vincent de Paul (Paris) and director of Inserm Research Unit UMR745 at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical and Biological Sciences of Paris Descartes. Dr. Patrick Aubourg is particularly involved, at the national and european levels, in several networks which have the aim to develop new therapeutic approaches in neurodegenerative diseases, in particular in the field of leukodystrophies.

Research director at the CNRS, Etienne Audinat is group leader of the team "Neurone-Glia Interactions" at Paris Descartes University (Inserm U603; CNRS UMR8154). He received an Inserm Avenir Award in 2001 and his current research focuses on the functional properties of the different glial cells of the central nervous system and on their interactions with neurons. He was member of the section "Physiology" of the CNRS national committee between 2004 and 2008 and he is member of the scientific advisory board of the French Foundation for Research on Epilepsy and of the French Society for Neuroscience.

Head of research at INSERM, Anne Baron is coordinator of “Development, Glial pathology and Repair” research axe (Centre de Recherche de l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moëlle épinière, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital) and group leader of the team “Molecular and cellular approaches of CNS myelin repair”. She studies the myelin repair of de- or dysmyelinating diseases in different animal models (rodent and primate) in order to develop therapeutical strategies  to promote the endogenous or exogenous repair of central myelin for patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, spinal trauma and some leucodystrophia. Awarded with the Charles Ketelear Prize, Belgian Society of Multiple Sclerosis in 1984, Prize of the Institut Electricité-Santé in 1996, she recently received the NRJ Prize from Institut de France. Knight of the Legion of Honour, Anne Baron is also teaching at Paris 6, Paris-Sud 11 and Paris 12 Universities.

With more than 200 publications in scientific reviews, about 90 lectures in Universities and Research Centers in more than 20 countries, and also many plenary lectures on physiology, physiopathology, sensori-motor function and in particular, on oculomotricity, vestibular system, equilibrium control and movement perception, spatial memory. He has been one of the pioneers of Microgravity physiology experiments. Alain Berthoz, author of seven books, is an outright figure of worldwide Neuroscience and cognitive sciences. Since 1993, Professor and holder of the chair of Physiology at the Collège de France, he leads the laboratory of Physiology of Perception and Action (Collège de France/CNRS). Member of the Académie des Sciences, Paris, he has obtained many prizes like the La Caze Prize and the CEA Prize of the Académie des Sciences, the Prize of the Académie de Médecine de Paris, Dax Award for Neuroscience (USA), International Prize of Neurology, Pavie University. Alain Berthoz is moreover member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, of the Academia Europae and other international academies (Belgium, Bulgaria). He is Knight of the Legion of Honour, Officier of Ordre National du Mérite and Commandeur de l’ordre du mérite de la République Italienne.

Alexis Brice is professor and hospital doctor at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Formely head of the service at the Cytogenetic and Genetic Department, he leads the “Neurogenetic” team (U975 INSERM) and the DNA & Cell Bank. Between 1992 and 2006, he was also co-leader of the training of Medical Genetic in PCEM1, DCEM2 at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and since 2004, in charge of the training unit Articles analysis of the second year of the Master Genetic, Pierre and Marie Curie University. Member of several councils and scientific committees, he was, moreover, member of the Scientific Advisory Panel for neurological diseases, European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) and member of the Scientific council of the European Society of Human Genetics.
Awarded in 2005 with the Prize of the Fondation pour la recherche médicale PCL (Parkinson Disease), Académie des Sciences (Institut de France), he is since 2007 corresponding member at the Biology section French National Academy of Medicine. In charge of the call for proposals “Longevity and aging” from the French National Research Agency (ANR) in 2007, Alexis Brice was in charge of the calls for proposals “Neuroscience, Neurology and psychiatry” then “Neurological and psychiatric diseases” from the French National Research Agency from 2005 to 2008. He is today co-director of the thematic Institute “Neuroscience, Cognitive Sciences, Neurology and Psychiatry”.

Education
Habilitation, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (2001)
PhD, Universit´e Pierre et Marie Curie (1993)
Student at Ecole Normale Sup´erieure (1986-1990)

Employment
DR2 CNRS, Laboratory of Neurophysics and Physiology, Université Paris Descartes (since 2005)
Senior research scientist, ISI, Torino (since (2005)
CR1 CNRS, Laboratory of Neurophysics and Physiology (2001-2005)
CR CNRS, Laboratory of Statistical Physics, ENS, Paris (1995-2001)
Visiting scientist, Biology Department, Brandeis University (1998-1999)
Post-doc, Physics Department, Universit`a “La Sapienza”, Rome (1993-1995).

Publications
Author of 67 articles: 46 primary research articles in journals, 6 review articles in journals, 4 book chapters, 8 conference proceedings, 3 other articles.

Invited talks
Invited speaker/lecturer at 59 international conferences/schools/workshops.

Supervision of students and post-docs
Supervised 5 PhD students and 5 post-docs.

Teaching
Teaches since 2004 in both Cognitive Science Master (DEC, ENS) and Neuroscience Master (Biology Department, Ecole Normale Sup´erieure: Neuroscience Master)

Organization of schools/workshops
Co-organizer of the Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience, in Arcachon (four weeks in August, 2006-2007) then Freiburg (2008-2009). Co-organized a ‘Neurosciences et Computation’ program, IHP, Paris (2002). Co-organized 6 other workshops and schools.

Refereeing
Referee for 8 research organizations (France, Germany, UK, Switzerland, USA, Israel) and 28 journals (Science, Nature, PNAS, main Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience and Physics journals).

Program committee
Served in the program committee of the two main computational neuroscience conferences: CNS (2003-2006) and Cosyne (2009)

Editorial boards
Currently in the editorial board of 4 journals: Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience; Biological Cybernetics; Network; Journal of Computational Neuroscience

Jocelyne Caboche est directrice de recherches au CNRS. Responsable de l’équipe « Signalisation neuronale et régulations géniques » au sein du Laboratoire de Neurobiologie des processus adaptatif (CNRS – UPMC), elle dirige depuis 2007 l’Institut de biologie intégrative de l’université de Pierre et Marie Curie qui regroupe onze formations de recherche. Les recherches menées par ces laboratoires ont pour objectif l'étude intégrée des mécanismes moléculaires et cellulaires qui président au développement, à la reproduction, aux grandes fonctions physiologiques des organismes animaux et végétaux, et à leur évolution.
Co-Responsable du Groupe de Réflexion Stratégique (GRS) de l’IFR de Biologie Intégrative de l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie de 2005 à 2007, elle a été membre nommée du conseil d’administration de l’UFR des Sciences de la Vie de 2001 à 2005.
Jocelyne CABOCHE est auteur d’un nombre important de publications scientifiques. Elle est aussi impliquée dans l’enseignement, la formation et la diffusion de la culture scientifique.

Research director at INSERM, Alain Chedotal is, since 2008, group leader at the Vision Institute, where his team studies the role of axon guidance molecules. He also tries to determine if axon guidance molecules are involved in diseases of the visual system, in the migration of neural stem cells, in demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis and some cancers. Member of the Board of directors of the Société Française des Neurosciences since 2005, he is also member of the Scientific council of the Federation pour la Recherche sur le Cerveau since 2007. Alain Chedotal was also member of the Board of Directors of the Société Française de Biologie du Développement from 1999 to 2003. He is moreover member of the editorial board of Development Growth and Differentiation since 2007 and of Plos One since 2008. He receives and Award from the Shlumberger Foundation for Education and Research in 2002 and the European Society of Neurochemistry recognised him as "Young Investigator" in 2001.

Jamel Chelly obtained his medical degree from the Medical School of Sfax, Tunisia in 1983. Between then and 1991, he acquired certificates in general biochemistry and cytogenetics, bachelor and master's degrees in genetics, and a PhD in human genetics from Paris Descartes University. In 1987 he was appointed as junior scientist by CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, France) and reached the level of research director. During his post-doctoral studies in the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford, UK, (1991–1994), he contributed to the identification of several disease-related genes. On his return to France in 1995 he set up the Laboratory of Genetics and Pathophysiology of Mental Retardation at the Cochin Institute. In September 2003, he was appointed as professor at Paris Descartes University and the medical centre of Cochin Hospital. He is also a founding member of the European XLMR Consortium. His achievemnts include the implication of genes such as Doublecortin/DCX, tubulins, OPHN1, IL1RAPL, TM4SF2 in lissencephaly/pachygyria spectrum and mental retardation disorders. Over the last years he received several prestigious awards, including a CNRS Silver Medal. He has numerous publications in many leading journals. His main current research interests are the genetics and pathophysiology of neurodevelopmental disorders.

Hervé Chneiweiss, research director CNRS and director of the laboratory "Glial plasticity" (INSERM, Paris-Descartes University, Saint-Anne Hospital) is neurologist and hospital doctor at the Neuro-oncology department of Pitié - Salpêtrière Hospital. He teaches at Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris Descartes, Paris XI and Paris XII universities. Technical adviser at the cabinet of the Research minister from 2000 to 2002, he has been member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the French National Network of Genopoles from 2002 to 2006 and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Fond Canadien de l’Innovation (2003) and president of the evaluation committee of the research networks of Québec (FRSQn 2008). Member of the ERMES committee (ethics) of INSERM since 2003, Hervé Chneiweiss is also member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Office Parlementaire d’Évaluation des Choix Scientifiques et Techniques (OPECST) since 2004 and member of the LEEM-Research Board of Directors since 2005 and the graduate school Brain-Cognition-Behavior since 2008. Author of more than 82 articles registered in Pubmed, he is member of the editorial committee of International Journal of Ethics since 2004 and of Progress in Neurobiology since 2005. He is editor in chief of Medicine/sciences review since 2006.

Pierre-Jean Corringer is engineer in chemistry, and performed his PhD and post-doc in organic synthesis of neuropeptides and amino acids. Researcher at the CNRS, he moved to the Pasteur institute to study the functional architecture of nicotinic receptors. His work led to the discovery of bacterial ancestors of these proteins. He created his group in 2008, which has already produced, in collaboration with Marc Delarue (Pasteur Institute) one of the first X-ray structure of the channel receptors.

Stanislas Dehaene, normalien, a intégré l’Inserm en 1989 comme chargé de recherche. Directeur de recherche Inserm de 1997 à 2005, il est aujourd’hui titulaire de la chaire de psychologie cognitive expérimentale au Collège de France. Stanislas Dehaene est par ailleurs, depuis 2002, directeur de l’unité de Neuroimagerie Cognitive (Inserm-Cea) au Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot à Orsay.

Membre de l’Académie des sciences depuis 2005 il est également conseiller éditorial de plusieurs revues et notamment de la revue PLOS Biology et de la revue Neuroimage, membre du Comité de pilotage du programme Neurosciences de l’ANR et du Conseil de l’International Association For The Study Of Attention And Performance.

Professor and attending neurologist since 1992, Jean-Yves Delattre, leads the Mazarin neurology service at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital since 1998. In charge of the neuroscience training at the Necker-Enfants Malades Medicine Faculty from 1992 to 2000, he is since 1998, group leader of the experimental neuro-oncology team, INSERM. Member of several societies such as Société Française de Neurologie, Association Française des Neuro-Oncologues d’Expression Française, European Neurological Society, European Association of Neuro-Oncology, American Academy of Neurology and the American Association for Cancer Research. Jean-Yves Delattre belongs otherwise to editorial committees of several reviews including Revue Neurologique, Neuro-Oncology, The Oncologist or the Journal of Clinical Oncology. General secretary of Neurology Teachers College from 1993 to 1999, he has been president of the ANOCEF (Association des Neuro-Oncologues d’Expression Française) from 1995 to 2002, Vice-chairman of Brain tumour group, EORTC (European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer) from 1996 to 2002 and president EANO (European association of neuro-oncology) from 2000 to 2002. He is author of more than 249 articles identified by PubMed including 186 in English.

Alain Destexhe, research director CNRS and CNRS Silver Medal 2008 is today member of the Integrative and computational neuroscience unit (UNIC) of the CNRS at Gif-sur-Yvette. In 2000, he got an ATIP young researcher startup from CNRS and participated to the creation of this unit of research which associates experimentation and theory.

During his PhD in the laboratory of Ilya Prigogine, Nobel prize of Chemistry 1977, he has described the electroencephalographic activity of human brain with dynamical systems and chaos theory before joining the Salk Institute of San Diego where he has set up during three years an international collaboration between biologists and physicists, which gave rise to a record number of scientific publications.

In the next five years, Alain Destexhe created a computational neuroscience laboratory at the faculty of medicine of Laval University (Québec, Canada) in order to continue his theoretical research in close relation with experiments. He is editor in chief of the "Journal of Computational Neuroscience".

Researcher at CNRS, ATIP awarded in 2005 and 2008, David Di Gregorio is group leader of the laboratory « Dynamic Neuronal Imaging » in the de[artment of Neuroscience at the Pasteur Institute. He has benefited from the ANR grant (ANR Neuroscience; ANR/BBSRC) in 2008. Invited lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in 2005-2007, at Cold Spring Harbor in 2006-2008, he is moreover member of the European Neuroscience Institute and the American society for Neuroscience.

Jacques DROULEZ (born in 1950) received a mathematical and engineer training (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris), a medical training (MD: Lariboisière - St Louis, Paris), a master in biochemistry and a Habilitation to supervise research in cognitive sciences. He has got a fellowship from the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (1978-1982). He is now Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and head of the research team « active perception and exploration of objects » at the Laboratory of Physiology of Perception and Action (CNRS-Collège de France). His main research themes are the perception of 3D motion and objects, the theoretical study of models for multi-sensory interactions and the adaptive motor control. He has about 90 publications in international journals including one in PNAS on sensory-motor integration model and one in Nature on object perception during self-motion. He is involved in several European and national research programs and in multidisciplinary scientific networks.

Bruno Dubois is currently Professor of Neurology at the Neurological Institute of the Salpetriere University Hospital in Paris. He is Director of the Cognitive and Behavioural Unit of this hospital and in charge of the National Center for Rare Dementias and for Young Onset Alzheimer’s Disease. He is also Director of the Research Inserm Laboratory “Cognition, Neuroimaging and Brain Diseases” of the Research Center of ICM. He has published on anatomical and biochemical studies on the central cholinergic systems in rodents and humans; on cognitive neuropharmacology; and on neuropsychology in patients with dementia, with special reference to memory and executive functions. He recently organized an Expert Consensus on the new criteria for Alzheimer’s disease and a Task Force on the new criteria for Parkinson’s disease dementia. He is principal or co-investigator of a number of research programmes focusing on AD, MCI and dementia in Parkinson’s disease.

During the past ten years, I have been focusing on spoken language processing and acquisition by the human brain. My approach is to constrain theories of adult and infant speech processing by proposing models that take into account both types of studies.Specifically, I am involved in the following three areas:
•    The role of phonological knowledge in speech perception.
(A. Christophe, Y. Hirose, S. Frota, C. Pallier, S. Peperkamp, N. Sebastian )
It has been noted from a very long time that acquiring a language late has consequences on how we produce speech (foreing accent). In this project, we investigate whether such effects are also found in perception. Our working hypothesis is that whenever you listen to a speech sound, it is recoded into what we call a phonological code, that is an abstract representation that is specifically tailored for the need of one's maternal language. Such representation is acquired during the first year of life and impacts on how we make distinctions in speech sounds and how we segment speech into words (see our scientific project [french]; see also the report of the HFSP project [english]).

•    Speech normalization.
( S. Kouider, I. Darcy, C. Pallier, N. Sebastian )
Speech sounds are highly variable. Nevertheless we perceive the word "dog" as the same token, whether is it articulated in isolation, in continuous speech, fast or slow, by a male or a female voice. How does such perceptual constancy obtain? We have investigated this issue by studying adaptation to highly compressed speech. We are exploring the possibility that while some mechanism for speech normalization are acoustically based, universal, and present in the newborn, others are language-dependent, and use knowledge acquired about the phonological properties of the maternal language.

•    Bilingualism and plasticity.
(A.-C. Bachoud-Lévi, C. Pallier, S. Peperkamp, C. Jacquemot, N. Sebastian )
Why is it so easy for a young kid to learn several languages at the same time? Why is it so hard for an adult to learn one more language? Bilingualism raises interesting questions regarding the plasticity of higher brain functions. We are studying these issues with psycholinguistic methods and brain imagery in different bilingual populations. We are studying the impact of age of acquisition, degree of final proficiency, and structural distance between languages. The same questions are investigated in monolingual populations which loose part of their languages due to brain lesions.

Recruté au CNRS en 1983 comme chargé de recherche, Salah El Mestikawy est aujourd’hui directeur de recherche CNRS. Membre du Laboratoire de Neurobiologie et Psychiatrie (Inserm-CNRS-UPMC) dirigé par Bruno Giros, il est depuis mars 2008 titulaire d’une Chaire de Recherche du Canada à l’Institut Universitaire Douglas en Santé mentale à Montréal (McGill University, Montréal) et dirige une équipe internationale de recherche basée à la fois au Québec et à Paris. Il étudie les neurones glutamatergiques, éléments clés de la fonction cérébrale de l’être humain. Ces neurones sont impliqués dans toutes les fonctions cérébrales y compris la plupart des maladies neurologiques et psychiatriques.

Les travaux de recherche de son équipe devraient permettre, à la fois, d’augmenter nos connaissances fondamentales sur le système nerveux central et de fournir de nouveaux outils diagnostiques ou pharmacologiques ciblant les neurones glutamatergiques.

Valentina Emiliani: obtained her PhD in Physics at the University ‘La Sapienza’, Rome Italy in 1996 working on the investigation of tunneling effect in asymmetric double quantum wells by ultrafast spectroscopy. From 1997 to 2000 she joined the group of Prof. Thomas Elsaesser at the Max Born Institute of Berlin as a post doc, working on the investigation of carrier transport in single quantum wire by low temperature scanning near field optical microscopy (SNOM). From 2000 to 2002 she was in the laboratory directed by Prof. Marcello Colocci at the European laboratory for nonlinear spectroscopy, Florence Italy. There she worked on the investigation of light propagation in disordered structure by SNOM. From 2002 to 2004 she was at the Institute Jacques Monod, where she was working on the investigating of the role of mechanical forces on the establishment of cell polarity by the use of the optical tweezers technique. In the year 2005 she obtained the price EURYI 2005 and she moved in the Neurophysiology and New Microscopies Laboratory to lead a research team of physicists dedicated to the development of advanced optical technique for neuroscience.

V. E is coauthor of 40 publications in international journals.

Head of research at the CNRS and ATIP awarded in 2008, Philippe Faure is group leader of the team Neurophysiology and behaviour in the laboratory "Neurobiology of adaptative processes”. He is involved in different training courses at Pierre and Marie Curie University, École normale supérieure and at AgroParisTech.

Neurologist, professor and hospital doctor at Pierre and Marie Curie Medecine Faculty, Bertrand Fontaine is group leader of the team « Genetics of multiple sclerosis and muscle excitability disorders » at the Centre de Recherche de l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moëlle. In charge of the training at the Departement of Neurology, he is also coordinator of the Reference Center for Muscular Channelopathies, two national networks Résocanaux and REFGENSEP and of the center for biological ressources « Genetic of multiple sclerosis ».

Gilles Fortin received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris-6, France. He held a postdoctoral position at the MRC Center for Developmental Neurobiology at Guy’s Hospital in the laboratory of Professor Andrew Lumsden. His work on the chick embryo revealed a striking relationship between early rhombomeric pattern and the ontogeny of basal rhythmogenic circuitry in the brainstem, extending the significance of hindbrain segmentation beyond modular anatomical organization to the level of network assembly and function. He has been working since at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique where he is leading the group Hindbrain Integrative Neurobiology at the Institut de Neurobiologie Alfred Fessard in Gif-sur-Yvette. His present work focuses on the biological bases of the breathing behaviour.  His group investigates in the mouse, using developmental genetics tools, electrophysiology and calcium imaging, the ontogeny of distinct vital neural oscillator networks that couple at embryonic stages to establish the respiratory rhythm generator.

 Fiona Francis is group leader of the AVENIR team "Cytosquelette et  pathologie de la migration neuronale" at the /Fer à Moulin/ Institute.  She is member of the /Société Française de Neurosciences/, the Federation  of European Neuroscience societies, the European Society of Human Genetics and the EMBO Fellows Society. She reviews articles for several scientific journals such as Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, the European Journal of Neuroscience, and the Journal of Neuroscience. Awarded with a grant from the ACI program Biology of development and integrative  physiology in 2002-2004, FRC grants in 2002, 2004 and 2005, and an INSERM Avenir 2008-2011 award, she also has a  grant for 2009-2010 from the French National Research Agency. The Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation awarded her a /"Coup d'élan"/ Prize in 2008.

Thierry Galli, directeur de recherche Inserm, est responsable de l’équipe de recherche labellisée INSERM U950 « Trafic membranaire et morphogenèse neuronale & épithéliale » de l’Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS – Paris VII).

Médaille de la Ville de Paris (échelon Argent), lauréat de la Subvention de la Ville de Paris en Recherche médicale et Santé, en 2006, il est éditeur en chef de Biology of the Cell depuis 2009, et a édité, en 2007, avec Peter Mc Pherson, le N° de Current Opinion in Cell Biology consacré à « Membranes ».

Membre élu de la CSS1 de l’Inserm (2008-2011), il est depuis 2001 membre du Conseil de la Société de Biologie Cellulaire de France, depuis 2006 membre du Comité de Réflexion Stratégique du PRES de l’Université Paris Centre (P1-P5-P7) et depuis 2008 Représentant de l’Université P7 au Conseil de l’école doctorale Frontières du Vivant (ENS-P5-P7).

Il a déposé trois brevets :

T. Galli, S. Martinez-Arca, et D. Louvard. « Control of Membrane Traffic », Demande Brevet Européen en 2000 (Institut Curie – CNRS) ;

JC Mazié, T. Galli. Dépôt de l’anticorps monoclonal Cl158.2 dirigé contre la protéine TI-VAMP(Institut Pasteur) en 2000 également ;

Dépôt de trois lignées de souris génétiquement modifiées (tetOmin-GFP, GFP-TIVAMP, GFP-Longin) au centre d’archivage européen des mutants de souris (EMMA), en 2007.

Patricia Gaspar is a neurologist and a research Director at the INSERM. From 2003 to 2006 , she headed a research laboratory at the Salpêtrière Hospital, and is now co-director of the Institut du Fer à Moulin, a research centre devoted to Neuroscience affiliated to Inserm and University of Paris 6.

After a medical training in Paris Patricia Gaspar did her PhD under the supervision of Brigitte Berger (Paris) analysing dopamine circuit organisation in the human brain. She did a postdoc in the laboratory of Jon Kaas (Vanderbilt University US) working on the primate motor cortex. Starting her own laboratory, in the department of Constantino Sotelo (Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris) she focused on the role monoamines on neural development. Major discoveries of the team have concerned the identification of the role of serotonin on the construction of sensory maps, and the characterization of transient cellular targets for serotonin during development. This indicated that antidepressants such as SSRIs can have major effects on the developing brain, with long-lasting consequences on brain wiring and behaviour. More recently the team discovered how neuronal activity and axon guidance mechanisms interact via calcium sensitive adenylate cyclases.

Patricia Gaspar is an associate editor for European Journal of Neuroscience, and is a regular reviewer for journals such as PLOS, J. Neuroscience, Neuron, PNAS, J. Comparative Neurology, Neuroscience, Neuropsychopharmacology, MCN. Her expertise is also solicited in several international grant applications (Welcome trust, Belgian Research). In France she has bee involved in the organisation and evaluation of research: board of the French Society for Neuroscience from 2000 to 2004, she is a member of the INSERM Commission for Neurosciences since 2008.
She participates to several actions destined to promote the establishment of junior Neuroscientists in the field. From 2003 to 2009 she animated a satellite meeting of the French Society for Neuroscience "Club Développement des réseaux neuronaux", to foster interactions between researchers in the field of neural development. She was a member of the INSERM AVENIR commission from 2003-to 2008, a program supporting the instalment on young Research team leaders in France. Since 2009 , she is responsible for the PhD Program of the Paris School of Neurosciences.

Christian Giaume, Directeur de Recherche CNRS, is head of the laboratory INSERM U840 «Junctional communication and interaction between neuronal and glial networks». As an invited speaker he has participed to more than 50 international meetings and has organized several national and international meetings. He is member of the Scientific Committee of Glia (since 2001), Biology of the Cell (2002-2005) and the Journal of Neurochemistry (since 2009). He is also member of the Scientific Comittee of the Fédération de la Recherche sur le Cerveau (2003-2009), of the Commission ANR CSS8 (since 2007) and of the "Peer Review Process" du German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) Priority Program "The Significance of Neuroglia for the Formation, Function and Plasticity of Synapses" (2004-2009). Finally, he is responsible of a teaching unit on “Neuroglial interactions” at the University Pierre et Marie Curie and teaches in several universities (Orléans, Chatenay-Malabry, ENS Paris, Paris 6).

Anne-Lise Giraud is research director at CNRS, and heads the “Auditory Language Group”, one of the four Inserm U960 teams of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of the DEC at ENS – Paris. We study the neurophysiological mechanisms of speech perception and production, and their dysfunction in communication disorders, as deafness, autism, dyslexia and stuttering.

Jean-Antoine Girault, MD, PhD, holds an Inserm research director position. He is currently head of the Institut du Fer à Moulin, an Inserm-UPMC center of research, with about ten teams working on the development and plasticity of the nervous system. His research is mainly on the signalling mechanisms involved in the plasticity of the nervous system, in normal and pathological conditions. The fields of application concern drug addiction and Parkinson disease, as well as axoglial interactions in myelinated fibers. The approaches used include molecular and cellular biology, functional neuroanatomy, and behavioural studies, etc. Member of various professional committees and the French and American societies for Neurosciences, Jean-Antoine Girault has actively participated in the creation of the Neuropôle de recherche francilien (NeRF). Very involved in teaching and training of young researchers and doctors, he is director of the Paris School of Neuroscience (ENP) since 2007.

From 1983, when I enter for the first time in a research laboratory, to 2007 where I am at the head of an INSERM laboratory, and Professor in the department of Psychiatry of McGill University, my interests evolved from biochemical and molecular aspects of the synaptic transmission to more integrated approaches involving behavioral studies and clinical research. However, I always tried to stay connected to human pathologies, either from direct genetic studies that are now performed in my laboratory or by studying neurotransmitter systems that are targeted by psychotropes of clinical or social use.

1983-1987 : Enkephalin metabolism in the brain.

During my thesis work, I completed the first characterization of the Aminopeptidase M (APM) involvement in the endogenous degradation of cerebral enkephalins.. Production of specific anti-catalytic antibodies. Rational design of specific inhibitors for APM and enkephalinase. Molecular cloning of APM.

1988-1991 : Study of dopamine receptors.

After a 4 month stay at Genentech Inc, in San Francisco, I had to setup Molecular Biology in the Jean-Charles Schwartz’s laboratory. Thereafter, together with P. Sokoloff, our research was extremely fertile with the molecular cloning of two isoforms for the dopamine D2 receptor, and specially the molecular cloning and characterization of a novel dopamine receptor, the D3 receptor. The discovery of this novel dopamine receptor with high affinity for antipsychotics, was very provocative at this time, where everybody thought that only two dopamine receptors existed. We were also able to unravel the brain localization, functional, pharmacological and genetic characteristics of the D3 dopamine receptor.

1992- 1998: Miscellaneous.

Gene characterization and knockout of the ß-Adrenergic Receptor Kinase-1. Involvement of the glycine receptor ß subunit in the neurological mutation spastic in mice. Molecular and functional characterization of the vesicular transporter for GABA and Glycine.

1991-       : Study of Na+/Cl--dependent neuronal transporters.

Molecular cloning and pharmacological characterization of the rat and human dopamine transporters. Structure-activity relationships study using chimera’s transporters and site-directed mutagenesis. Molecular cloning of the glycine transporter, the creatine transporter, and two orphan transporters RxT-1 and -2. Knockout of the dopamine transporter in mice. Biochemical, functional and behavioral study of KO mice.

1999-2008: Director of the INSERM U-513 laboratory “Neurobiology  and Psychiatry”
2007-        : Canada Research Chair "Neurobiology of Mental Disorders"
In addition to the above projects which are still ongoing:

Molecular and functional characterization of the first lysosomial amino-acid transporter. Study of the Organic Cation Transporters. Study of glutamate vesicular transporters. Yeast 2-hybrids screening of proteins interacting with 15 different transporters.
Development of animal models to study the role and function of dopamine in drug addiction. Study of the relationships between dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonine in drug addiction. Molecular study of dependence and tolerance mechanisms. Study of the role of memory in drug addiction. Development of animal models to search genes involved in the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders, with focus on depression and schizophrenia.
Genetic studies of psychiatric disorders., with focus on autistic, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Investigation of candidate genes, mainly on genes involved in brain development and neurotransmission.

Present Position
08-present: Team Leader, Group for Neural Theory, INSERM U960, DEC, ENS
05- 08: Senior Research Scientist, GNT, Department of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Superior and College de France, 3 rue d’Ulm, Paris.
04- present: Senior Research Scientist, Departement de Neuroscience, Institut Pasteur, 25 rue Dr. Roux, 75015 Paris, France

Positions Previously Held
02-04: Senior Research Fellow, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London, UK
09/99-09/02: NSF Biological Informatics Fellow,
-Coginition et Recepteurs, Department of Neuroscience, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France
- UNIC, Institut Alfred Fessard, CNRS, France.

Education
Ph.D. Theoretical Neuroscience, March 1999, University of Pittsburgh and Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA
M.A. Mathematics, May 1996, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
M.S. Biomathematics, December 1993, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
B.S. Physics/History (cum laude) May 1989, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.

Stéphane Haik, docteur en médecine et lauréat de la faculté de médecine de Paris V en 1997, reçoit le Prix de l’Internat des Hôpitaux de Paris en 2000 (médaille d’Argent). Après un doctorat en Neurosciences consacré à l’étude des agents de type prion, il est aujourd’hui neurologue à l’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière à Paris et membre de la Cellule Nationale de Référence des MCJ et du Réseau national de surveillance des maladies de Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Lauréat Avenir INSERM de 2005 à 2007, il co-dirige depuis 2009 avec Charles Duyckaerts une équipe qui travaille sur la maladie d’Alzheimer et les maladies à prions au sein de l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière. Il est par ailleurs coordonnateur associé du Centre National de Référence des Agents Transmissibles Non Conventionnels.

Membre de la French Society of Neuropathology, de l’International Society of Neuropathology et de l’EURO-CNS and European Confederation of Neuropathological Societies en 2000, il est rapporteur pour de nombreuses revues scientifiques parmi lesquelles The Lancet, Neurology, Trends in Microbiology, Human Mutation, Journal of General Virology, Journal of Neurology.

Former graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, Michel Hamon is director of research at INSERM and leader of the team “Pain, stress and neurovegetative correlates” at INSERM U894. He previously set up and directed the INSERM Unit (U288 than U677) of Neuropsychopharmacology from 1985 to 2008. President of the Société des Neurosciences from 1999 to 2001, member of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Scientific Committee in Neurosciences (US) from 1999 to 2003, member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the MILDT (French agency against drugs and addiction) from 1999 to 2005, member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the French Foundation for Medical Research from 2003 to 2007, Michel Hamon is, since 2004, member of the Executive Committee of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP), since 2007, Vice-president of the French Association for Biological Psychiatry, and since 2008, Vice-president of the scientific committee of the Institute for Scientific Studies on Alcohol (IREB). He is moreover, since 2005, associate member of the French National Academy of Medicine. Author of more than 500 papers in peer-reviewed journals and editor of five books, he teaches at universities Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris-Descartes and Paris-Sud 11 and at the ESPCI (Sup. School in Physics and Chemistry, Paris). He won several awards, notably the Paul Ehrlich Prize of the French Society for Medicinal Chemistry in 2002. He is also involved in editorial activities as member of the boards of Clin. Neuropharmacol., Eur. J. Pharmacol., Fundam. Clin. Pharmacol., Encéphale, J. Recept. Signal Transduct., NS Arch. Pharmacol., Neurochem. Int., Neuroscience, Synapse and World J. Biol. Psychiatry.

Research director at the CNRS, Philippe Hantraye is since 2001, director of the laboratory “Neurodegenerative diseases: mechanisms, therapeutics and imaging” (CNRS-CEA) and since 2004, director of MIRCen (Molecular Imaging Research Center). Scientific adviser at the department of Life Sciences of CEA, since 2000, he is in charge of imaging thematic at the cluster MEDICEN Paris Region since 2006, member of the steering committee of the foundation for scientific cooperation Alzheimer for biomedical imaging since 2007, he represents the CEA in the steering committee of the Thematic Institute of Neuroscience since 2008. Awarded with the grant of the France-Parkinson association in 1987, he has been recipient of the Hoffman-La Roche Prize on anxiety in 1989. He is moreover member of the French association for Neuroscience since 1989 and, since 1991, of the European Neuroscience Association and the Society for Neuroscience (USA).

Etienne Hirsch, research director CNRS, leads the laboratory “Experimental therapeutics of neurodegeneration” (INSERM-UPMC) since 2001. President of the Société Française des Neurosciences, President of the Scientific advisory board of the Fédération de la Recherche sur le Cerveau and member of the Scientific advisory board of CMPB Göttingen since 2007, he is moreover, member of the program committee of Movement Disorders Society. Since 2006, he is also member of the scientific advisory board of the Fox Foundation, member of the Society for PSS since 2005, member of the scientific advisory board of Nordic Center for excellence program in molecular medicine since 2005, member of the Society for Neuroscience (US). Author of several articles, he has published in Nature (1), Nature Genetics (1), PNAS (10), JCI (1), J. Neuroscience (10), Annals Neurol (10), Brain (11). His works has been awarded with several prizes like Tourette Syndrome Association Award, in July 1986, the Young researcher award, and in July 1990 the prize of the European Society for Neurochemistry and the Grand Prix de l’Académie de Sciences, the Prize from Foundation for the biomedical research Prix François Lhermite, in 1999.

Research Director INSERM, Bertrand Lambolez is group leader of the team "Thalamo-cortical networks". In 1999 he obtained the International Society for Neurochemistry Young Scientist award for the invention of the single cell RT-PCR techniques. He serves as Associate Editor in Journal of Neuroscience Research and Neurochemical Research and is also member of the CNRS section 25 standing committee (2008-2012).

Director of research at CNRS Serge Laroche is head of the "Neurobiology of Learning, Memory and Communciation" laboratory (CNRS - Paris-Sud University) in Orsay. His main interest is in the cellular and molecular mechanisms of brain plasticity and memory and in the dysfunctions of these mechanisms that are responsible for memory deteriorations/disorders in different brain pathologies.

Denis Le Bihan has achieved international recognition for his outstanding contributions to the development of new imaging methods allowing, in particular to study human brain function. His work has combined extremely innovative methods, developed for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) with the application of these methods to questions of the utmost scientific and clinical importance. Dr. Le Bihan is especially credited with developing, refining, and introducing into research and clinical practice the concept of diffusion MRI, a new and powerful approach to study normal and diseased brain anatomy and function, as well as brain wiring, from the measurement of molecular motion, in particular water, in biological tissues. This method is today used worldwide both for basic research and clinical applications, especially in acute brain ischemia, white matter diseases and connectivity disorders. Dr. Le Bihan is a full member of the French Academy of Sciences and currently the Founding Director of NeuroSpin, a new Institute aimed at developing and using ultra high field Magnetic Resonance to understand the brain, from mouse to man. Dr. Le Bihan has authored or co-authored over 250 articles, book chapters and review articles in the fields of MRI, imaging, neuroscience and radiology. For his contributions, Dr. Le Bihan was awarded in 2001 the Gold Medal of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He is also the 2002 recipient of the Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and French Academy of Sciences and a 2003 corecipient (with S. Dehaene) of the prestigious Louis D. Award of the Institut de France. D. Le Bihan is Knight of the French National Order of Merit.

Marion Leboyer, Professeur des Universités-Praticien Hospitalier depuis septembre 1998 (Université Paris XII) est responsable du Pôle de Psychiatrie (CHU Créteil) du Groupe Hospitalier Chenevier-Mondor, depuis janvier 2007. Ce pôle représente plus du quart de l’activité de psychiatrie de l’Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris et des missions hospitalo-universitaires comme les Urgences psychiatriques de l’hôpital Henri Mondor et la psychiatrie de liaison ou encore des missions innovantes comme la création de centres experts pour les troubles bipolaires, la schizophrénie ou l’autisme de haut niveau. Elle est également responsable de l’équipe « Psychiatrie Génétique » au sein de l’Institut Mondor de Recherches Biomédicales (Inserm U841).

Depuis Juillet 2007, elle dirige la Fondation FondaMental, fondation de coopération scientifique, dédiée à la recherche et aux soins en Santé Mentale (issue du RTRS Santé Mentale, labellisé par le ministère de la Recherche).

Lauréate du Prix Inserm de recherche en Santé Publique en 2002, la Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale lui a été décerné le Prix de la recherche en 2007 au cours des Victoires de la Médecine. Elle est par ailleurs Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Stephane Lehericy is director of the Centre for Neuroimaging Research - CENIR at the Salpetriere hospital. He is Professor of Neuroradiology (neuroradiology Department, Salpetriere Hospital) and Inserm CRICM - INSERM  U975 (ex-U610). He completed is PhD in basic neuroscience with Pr Yves Agid (Inserm U678) and his post-doc in functional neuroimaging in the SHFJ-CEA in Orsay with le Pr Denis Le Bihan. He spent three years at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research / University of Minnesota (Pr Kamil Ugurbil). He is research active with several programme grants (PHRC, ANR, France Alzheimer, France Parkinson, ENP). His scientific interest is in structural and functional brain mapping in the normal and pathological brain. His focus is on the functional organisation of the normal human basal ganglia and movement disorders (dystonia, Parkinsonian syndromes, Huntington's disease) as well as neurodegenerative dementias. He has contributed to the understanding of the functional and anatomical circuitry of the basal ganglia using fMRI and DTI.

Jean Livet is a researcher at INSERM, recipient of the 2007 AVENIR grant. He is a group leader of the team “Development of neuronal circuits” in the department biology of development at the Vision Institute in Paris. After his PhD with Christopher E. Henderson at IBDM (Marseille), he worked as a post-doc with Dr. Jeff W. Lichtman’s (Harvard University) on the generation of “Brainbow” multicolour fluorescent mices for visualizing neural circuits.

Pierre-Marie Lledo, directeur de Recherche au CNRS, est chef de l’Unité « Perception et Mémoire » de l'Institut Pasteur, Directeur du laboratoire « Gènes, Synapses et Cognition » du CNRS. Il est également Directeur d'enseignement à l'Institut Pasteur et enseigne aussi dans les Universités Paris VI et Paris XI.

Il est rapporteur pour de nombreuses revues (Nature, Science, Nature Neurosci., Neuron, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA), TINS, Eur. J. Neurosci., J. Neurophysiol., Cerebral Cortex, Neuroscience, J ou Physiol.). Il est régulièrement sollicité pour des expertises relatives à l’allocation de financements tant en France (CNRS, ACI, Régions Ile-de-France, Aquitaine et Rhône-Alpes, ANR, FRM) qu’à l’étranger U.K. : Wellcome Trust ; Suisse : SNF; Espagne : CSIC et ANEP ; Italie : CNR ; Nouvelle-Zélande : HRC; USA : NSF; Israël : ISF et Allemagne: DFG). Il est "Review Editor" à Journal Frontiers in Neuroscience depuis janvier 2008, "Associate Editor" à Journal Frontiers in Neurogenesis depuis décembre 2008 et "Field Editor" pour Encyclopediae of Neuroscience (2008), Springer Editor.

Il est membre de la Société Française des Neurosciences, de la Society for Neurosciences, de la Société de Physiologie et de l'European Neuroscience Association. Il est également membre de l'Academia Europaea depuis 2006. Il a par ailleurs reçu plusieurs prix et notamment, en 2005, celui de l'Académie Nationale de Médecine et celui de la Fondation NRJ-Institut de France et, en 2007, le Prix Jaffé de l'Institut de France. Il est, depuis 2007, membre du Conseil Scientifique de l'Institut Pasteur.

Professor of neurology (Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Pierre and Marie Curie University), Catherine Lubetzki leads an INSERM research team. Her works aim at understanding neuroglial interactions in developmental myelinisation and demyelinating pathologies and opening new prospects on repair capacity. Her clinical studies are focused on the care of multiple sclerosis patients, and she coordinates the clinical research group on multiple sclerosis in Salpêtrière hospital. Catherine Lubetzki is also president of the scientific advisory board of the Association for Multiple Sclerosis Resarch (ARSEP) and involved in different international scientific committees. She is also member of the editorial committee of several journals as Multiple Sclerosis, Neuron /Glia Biology and Brain.

Michel Mallat  MD PhD focuses his researches on the role of microglial cells during normal development or in pathologies.  He is senior scientist at INSERM and leads a research group named “Development and function of microglia” at the Pitié-Sapêtrière Hospital.  He also teaches at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. Member of the Society for Neuroscience, Société française des Neurosciences and of the Club français des cellules gliales, Michel Mallat is, since 2003, member of the editorial board of Glia.

Jacques Mallet est auteur de plus de 340 articles scientifiques parus dans des journaux avec comités de lecture et a déposé près de 40 brevets portant principalement sur l’utilisation des vecteurs viraux dans le domaine de la thérapie génique visant en particulier les maladies neurodégénératives. Il a bénéficié depuis 1992 de contrats internationaux émanant, entre autres, de Human Frontier Scientific Program, l’European Science Foundation, la Commission Européenne. Il a enseigné la biologie à l’Ecole Polytechnique (1987-1999) et est intervenu à plusieurs reprises dans des cours internationaux organisés par l’EMBO et dans les cours d’été du Cold Spring Harbor à New York.
Il a été conférencier invité à de multiples colloques internationaux (environ 200) et donné des séminaires dans les plus prestigieuses universités aux Etats-Unis et en Europe.  Plus de 50 thèses ont été soutenues dans son laboratoire
Jacques Mallet est membre fondateur de la revue « Neurology of Disease » et co-éditeur de «Molecular Neurobiology ». Il est par ailleurs membre du comité éditorial de multiples revues de neurobiologie et de neurosciences. Il est membre du Conseil scientifique de plusieurs associations de patients comme « France Azheimer », « Retina France »….

Pascal Mamassian has a degree in engineering (Sup' Télécom, Paris), a masters in Cognitive Sciences (EHESS & Univ. Paris 6) and a PhD in Experimental and Biological Psychology (Univ. of Minnesota, USA). He has worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Germany) and New York University (USA). He was senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow (UK) before taking a researcher position at the CNRS. In 2004, he received a "chaire d'excellence" from the French Ministry of Research. He is the founding director of the GDR-vision, a CNRS structure that links together all the French laboratories interested in vision science. He is one of the directors of he Vision Sciences Society and leads the vision team in the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception. His research interests focus on mid-level vision, the link between the processing of elementary features in the image and the awareness of natural scenes. Current research topics include three-dimensional perception, cross-modal perception, temporal dynamics of bistable perception, and probabilistic (Bayesian) modelling of perception.

Jean Mariani is Professor at Pierre & Marie Curie University, where he teaches neuroscience and aging biology, hospital practitioner at Charles Foix hospital where he leads the "Institut de la longévité" project. He leads the Neurobiology of adaptative processes laboratory (UMR CNRS-UPMC) since its creation in 2001. His works are focuses on the late stages of nervous system development, its aging and certain neurodegenerative pathologies. He was and is in different postions of responsibility at Pierre and Marie Curie University (member of he scientific advisory board of the University and of the UFR Life Sciences) and also at the Departement Life Sciences CNRS and many other fundations as well as the Foundation for Medical Research. Jean Mariani is also since 2002, the director of the Institut de la longévité et du vieillissement, created as an Scientific Interest Group and since 2007 head of the interdisciplinary program "Longévité et Vieillissement" CNRS.

Jean-Luc Martinot, directeur de recherche INSERM, médecin psychiatre, option pédopsychiatrie. Formation médicale et spécialisation au cours de l’Internat des Hôpitaux de Paris et d’un Clinicat dans des services de psychiatrie hospitalo-universitaires. Vice-président de l‘European Psychiatry Neuroimaging Section.

Coordinateur de programmes de recherche sur l’application des méthodes d’imagerie cérébrale chez des malades mentaux, depuis 1986.

Directeur de l‘unité de Recherche INSERM – CEA U.797 : «Imagerie et Psychiatrie », Orsay ; l’unité relève de l’institut Neurosciences de l’INSERM, de l’institut d’imagerie biomédicale du CEA (I2BM), et des Universités Paris Sud et Paris Descartes. Les recherches de cette unité mettent en relation les évaluations cliniques et cognitives de patients ayant des affections psychiatriques ou des addictions, avec les données issues de l’Imagerie par Résonance Magnétique (IRM) ou par tomographie à positons (PETscanner). Elles contribuent à décrire la physiopathologie cérébrale des maladies mentales en détectant des anomalies anatomiques, métaboliques et neurochimiques dans plusieurs affections psychiatriques comme la schizophrénie, la dépression, les troubles anxieux, l’autisme de l’enfant. Elles permettent également d'évaluer l’impact cérébral des psychotropes en situation réelle.

Les résultats obtenus mettent en évidence des régions du cerveau intéressantes pour orienter les recherches sur la physiopathologie des affections étudiées. Dans la schizophrénie, la clinique des hallucinations auditives a pu être directement reliée à des déviations anatomo-fonctionnelles de la région temporale, orientant la recherche de méthodes visant à moduler son activité. Au cours des troubles dépressifs, la localisation fronto-limbique des modifications anatomo-fonctionnelles soulève la question de leur lien avec la vulnérabilité psychopathologique, et la résistance aux thérapeutiques usuelles. Dans l’autisme, les altérations gyrus temporal supérieur suggèrent un trouble du développement. Des altérations marquées de la biochimie, ou de la morphologie et de l'ultrastructure cérébrale de sujets dépendants à l’alcool, ou au tabac et au cannabis, ont été détectées.

Alain Marty was born in 1949 in Montbéliard (eastern France). After studies at the Ecole Polytechnique he did his thesis work in Paris on biophysical properties of acetylcholine-gated channels in the marine mollusc Aplysia (thesis adviser, Philippe Ascher). He worked as a postdoc in Göttingen in the laboratory of Erwin Neher in 1980-1982, and participated then to the development of the patch-clamp technique. He led an independent group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1982 to 1994, working on calcium homeostasis in acinar cells of exocrine glands (1982-1990) and then on patch-clamp studies in brain slices (1991-1994). He has kept this theme of research since then, first as head of a team at the Max Planck Institut für biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen (1994 to 2000), and more recently as head of a CNRS Unit at the Université Paris 5 (2001-present).

Alain Marty’s contributions include the demonstration of a coupling between ion channel permeation and gating in acetylcholine-sensitive channels; a participation in the development of the patch-clamp method (in particular, measurement of cell capacitance; perforated patch recording); the discovery of BK channels in chromaffin cells, and of Ca-dependent Cl channels in acinar exocrine cells; the discovery of DSI and rebound potentiation (two novel forms of synaptic plasticity at central synapses); the demonstration of multivesicular release at central gabaergic synapses; the description of spontaneous calcium transients in axons and synaptic terminals of central gabaergic neurons.

Richard Miles, DR, INSERM, is the head of the “Cortex and Epilepsy” since 2002.  The group works on cortical circuits and epileptiform activities generated by tissues from animals and epileptic patients. He teaches at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. Richard Miles has participated in many international congresses and organized a Human Frontiers meeting in 1997, a Jacques Monod conference in 2000 and an ESF meeting on the subiculum in 2005.
He was a reviewing editor for Journal of Physiology from 1998 to 2005 and expert for DGXII European Commission on research from 1998 to 2004.  He is currently a member of the scientific commission of the French Foundation for Reseach on Epilepsy and of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Committee of the Wellcome Trust.

Nicole Ropert, biologist, in collaboration with Martin Oheim, physicist, are the principal investigators of the team entitled “Biophysics of gliotransmitter release” located within the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and New Microscopy, headed by Serge Charpak, that works on the neuro-glial interactions and the neuro-vascular coupling. Since 2005, the Ropert/Oheim team has been studying the mechanisms of Ca2+-sensitive release by astrocytes in culture. We demonstrated the ability for the astrocytes to undergo lysosomal exocytosis with very slow dynamics. We are now studying the functional consequences of the lysosomal release from astrocytes in normal and pathological conditions. We use evanescent wave fluorescent microscopy to study the activity of the cellular organelles implicated in cellular metabolism (lysosomes, mitochondria) in astrocytes in culture. We also use two-photon microscopy to study the metabolic activity of astrocytes in brain slice preparations. 

Hilke Plassmann is Assistant Professor at INSEAD, where she has been since September 2008. Since 2009 she is an affiliated PI at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory INSERM U960.

Before that, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences of the California Institute of Technology and the Department of Economics of Stanford University. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Muenster’s School of Business and Economics in 2005 and a M.Sc. jointly from Muenster University and Montpellier Graduate School of Management in 2001.

Hilke’s primary research areas are decision-making in the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and economics. In recent and current research projects she investigates the influence of cognitive concepts on the consumption experience, satiation for different rewards, and the neural basis of different decision-making related value signals, and ways to alter/self-control/regulate these signals.

Jean-Christophe is principal investigator at INSERM and head of the AVENIR team “Plasticity in cortical networks and epilepsy” at the Institut du Fer à Moulin since 2006. After a PhD at the Pasteur Institute and the University of Zurich (Switzerland), he joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (New York, USA) as a postdoctoral fellow and was appointed associate investigator at INSERM in 1999. His work focuses on the basic mechanisms of synaptic plasticity in cortical networks, their involvement in the context of epilepsy, as well as the functional impact of mutations associated with epileptic syndromes. Jean Christophe Poncer teaches at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (Master in biology), University Paris Diderot (European Master in genetics) and University Pierre & Marie Curie (Master of integrative biology and physiology). He also heads a master course entirely devoted to the hippocampal cortex. Member of the French Society of Neuroscience since 1992 and of the Society of Neuroscience since 1998, he is also a member of the council of the PhD program Cerveau, Cognition, Comportement at University Pierre & Marie Curie. He is an ad hoc reviewer for various scientific journals and funding agencies. In 2008, his team received support from the Biomedical and Health Research Program of the City of Paris, as well as the Neurological and Psychiatric Disease Program of the National Research Agency.

Laure Rondi-Reig s’intéresse à la mémoire, à la navigation et au vieillissement à travers l’approche de la génétique comportementale chez la souris et à ses applications à l’homme. Chargée de recherche CNRS depuis 2002, elle est aujourd’hui responsable de l’équipe « Navigation Mémoire et Vieillissement » (ENMVI) au sein du laboratoire Neurobiologie des Processus Adaptatifs (CNRS – UPMC). Elle a obtenu en 2007 des subventions de l’ANR et de la FRM pour ses projets intitulés « Early detection of age-related memory disorders: parallel and combined approach in mice and human », et « Early detection of age-related memory disorders using behavioural genetic and molecular approaches ».

Responsable d’une unité d’enseignement dans le Master Biologie Intégrative et Physiologie de l’UPMC, elle est par ailleurs, depuis 2004, membre du comité d'organisation du plateau d'exploration fonctionnelle du centre de Recherche et développement de Charles Foix, membre du comité de phénotypage puis d’animalerie de l'IFR 83 de Biologie Intégrative et depuis 2009 membre nommé de la commission de spécialistes 29 du CNRS.

Elle est aussi referee dans différents journaux parmi lesquels European Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience methods, Hippocampus, Brain Research Review, EMBO report, Learning and Memory.

Research director at INSERM and group leader (Molecular genetics of circadian rhythms) at Institut de Neurobiologie Alfred Fessard, Gif-sur-Yvette, Francois Rouyer's fields of expertise are neurogenetics, circadian clock, sleep-wake cycles, photoreception and drosophila. He teaches at Université Paris-Sud, Orsay and École Normale Supérieure, Paris. François Rouyer is a member of the board of the European Society for Biological Rhythms and of the scientific advisory board of the École Doctorale “Genes, genomes, cells” of  Paris-Sud University.

André Sobel is co-director of the Fer à Moulin Institute, where he leads the team “Intracellular signal relay and integration”. Member of the Société des Neurosciences, Société Française de Biochimie et Biologie Moléculaire, American Society for Cell Biology and the Society for Neurosciences, he is also president of the Committee for administration of the research, INSERM, and member of the ANR "non-thematic and young investigator" Committee. Since 2005, André Sobel is the regional scientific correspondent of INSERM and, since 2007, member of the committee of École Polytechnique for recruitments in biology. President of the CSCRI at UPMC from 2002 to 2005, he has been member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Medicine Faculty Pierre and Marie Curie University in 2007. He has moreover been vice-president of the department of biology of the École Polytechnique from 1996 to 2001. Involved in graduate and pre-graduate teaching activities, he has also been professor at the École Polytechnique from 1989 to 2001 and 2002 to 2003.

Researcher at INSERM and group leader of the team “Functions of ventricular cilia during neurogenesis”, Nathalie Spassky has benefited from the Young Investigator Grant of the Human Frontier Science Program for 2007 – 2010 and awarded for the Young researchers competition of the Mairie de Paris for 2009-2012. She is also member of the editorial committee of the French Glial Cell Club.

Professor of Zoology at the Faculty for Biology, University of Munich, and head of research at the CNRS, Hans Straka is the group leader of the team “Sensorimotor transformations” in the “Neurobiology of sensorimotor networks” laboratory. He is also member of the Deutsche Neurowissenschaftliche Gesellschaft and the American Society for Neuroscience

Professor of biology-geology and head of research at Inserm, Jean-Léon Thomas is group leader of the team “Oligodendrocyte development and neurovascular interactions”
at the Centre de Recherche de l'Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. He is also member of the experts group for section 69 (Neuroscience) of Pierre and Marie Curie University.

Professor at Paris Diderot University from 2001 to 2005, Alain Trembleau is currently Professor at UPMC (Pierre and Marie Curie University) where he teaches neuroscience.
He is scientific director of the “Electronic microscopy service” (IFR83). Member of the Institut Universitaire de France, he is in charge of the Master of Neuroscience at Pierre and Marie Curie University and co-director of the “Pasteur Course” entitled ”Development and plasticity of the nervous system”. Alain Trembleau leads the AVENIR & FRM team ”Development and plasticity of neural systems”, within the CNRS UMR 7102 at UPMC. He obtained the “Young Investigator award” from the Société française de neuroendocrinologie in 1994, and he is currently reviewer for many foundations and scientific journals. He was member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Histochem. Cytochem. from 1997 to 2003.
Member of the American Society for Neuroscience, Société française des neurosciences and Histochemical Society, Alain Trembleau has participated in many international symposia and organized several scientific meetings including, in 2006 and 2007, two scientific meetings at the Fondation des Treilles and, in 2009, an international symposium in Paris.

Philippe Vernier is neurologist, former Medical Resident at Grenoble University Hospital and head of research at CNRS in the “Development, evolution, plasticity of the nervous system” laboratory at Gif-sur-Yvette. Researches in his group concern fundamental aspects of brain development and evolution and aim at a better understanding of how brains of different species develop during embryogenesis, how they are structured and organized as functional systems. Philippe Vernier was in different positions of responsibility at the CNRS or other institutions (board of directors of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, scientific council of PHASE department, INRA and other foundations). He is currently president of the Neuropôle de Recherche Francilien (NeRF).

Marie Vidailhet, Neurologue, Professeur des Universités-Praticien Hospitalier (PU-PH) à l’Université Pierre Marie Curie Paris-6 est responsable des Mouvements Anormaux du Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris depuis 2007.

Au sein du Centre de recherche (CRICM), Inserm UMR 975, elle dirige l’équipe Mouvements anormaux et Ganglions de la base : physiopathologie et thérapeutique expérimentale.

Pendant 10 ans, elle était chef de service de Neurologie, à l’Hôpital Saint-Antoine, CHU Saint-Antoine, Université Pierre Marie Curie Paris-6. Depuis 1986, elle a travaillé auprès du Pr. Y Agid (Inserm U679 Paris), incluant un séjour d’une année auprès du Pr. CD Marsden (Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, Londres)

En clinique et en recherche, ses centres d’intérêt sont la maladie de Parkinson et les mouvements anormaux. Le sujet principal est celui de la dystonie: en thérapeutique expérimentale, elle a coordonné les études multicentriques sur le stimulation cérébrale profonde dans la dystonie. Grâce à un travail d’équipe, elle a abordé la physiopathologie de la dystonie par une approche multimodale associant clinique, électrophysiologie et imagerie, en se focalisation sur les anomalies fonctionnelle et structurelles cortico-striatales et cérébelleuses. Dans le domaine de la maladie de Parkinson et des syndromes parkinsoniens, elle a participé à des travaux sur le sommeil et Parkinson et sur les anomalies des mouvements oculaires.

Au cours des 10 dernières années, elle a été auteurs de 90 articles, avec un index H= 37 et elle a contribué à plusieurs chapitres de livres.

Elle est membre de société savantes parmi lesquelles la Société des Neurosciences, de la Société Française de Neurologie, l’American Academy of Neurology, des sociétés de Neurologie européennes (ENS et EFNS) et est aussi très activement impliquée dans la Movement Disorders Society. Parmi les activités institutionnelles, elle prend part aux travaux du Conseil National des Universités (CNU section 49-01) et de commissions de l’Inserm (CSS1). Très investie dans le soin et dans l’enseignement, elle est également présente dans les associations de patients.

Education

09/1996 Researcher at CNRS

09/1994 PhD in Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, UPMC

07/1990 Magistère Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon Research

01/1998 - now: UMR7102 CNRS UPMC. Integration of neuromodulatory signals controling neuronal excitability with approaches combining new optical methods and electrophysiology in vitro et in vivo.

Since january 2009: team leader «Cellular Integration of Neuromodulatory Processes»at UMR7102 "Neurobiology of Adaptative Processes".

10/1994 - 12/1997 Roger Y. Tsien's laboratory, University of California, San Diego. Cellular integration of the cAMP signal in the dendrites of lobster stomatogastric neurons.

09/1992 - 09/1993 Jean-Pierre Changeux's laboratory, Pasteur Institut, Paris. Electrophysiological characterization of nicotinic receptors in brain slices.

09/1989 - 09/1994: Alain Marty's team, Cellular Neurobiology, ENS, Paris. GABAergic transmission in the cerebellum.

Dr. Sidney Wiener (born in 1955 in Manhattan, USA) is a Research Director and Laboratory Director at the CNRS College de France LPPA. He joined the laboratory of Alain Berthoz in 1989, after a post-doctoral fellowship with Howard Eichenbaum in the Boston (USA) area. He holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Biophysics (1983) and an M.S. in Biophysics (1980) from Michigan State Univ. USA.; B.S. in Chemistry, 1977, from College of William and Mary USA).
His team has active or past collaborations with F Battaglia (Amsterdam) Bruce McNaughton (Lethbridge), Gyuri Buzsaki (Newark, USA), T Ono and H Nishijo (Toyama), J Taube (Dartmouth Coll. USA) as well as numerous collaborations with robotics groups, notably Agnes Guillot and Jean-Arcady Meyer of the ISIR (Univ Paris 6).
He is on the editorial board of the journal Hippocampus, directed a CNRS-National Science Foundation (US) collaborative research program, and led an Incitative Concerted Action research collaborative project funded by the French Ministry of Research.

Recruited as a Chargé de Recherches at 31 year old for studying the 3D morphology of neurons and the stereotactic cartography of the basal ganglia in primates. Promoted Directeur de Recherches at 42 year old, integrate the research unit of Yves Agid to apply the methods of quantitative anatomy of the basal ganglia to the study of human Parkinson’disease. Develops a 3D deformable atlas of the human basal ganglia for the localization of the electrodes of deep brain stimulation in parkinsonian patients.
    Creates with Luc Mallet, Psychiatrist and Chargé de Recherches Inserm, a new team in the Centre de Recherche de l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière (CRICM) devoted to the study of  the role of the basal ganglia in the processing of emotions in patients with obsessive compulsive disorders and Gilles de la Tourette disease.

Daniel Zytnicki is an expert in the electrophysiological study of motoneurons in vivo. He was the first to use the dynamic clamp technique in vivo (Brizzi et al. 2004). He has been collaborating for more than ten years with C. Meunier, a theoretical physicist. They published together a series of interdisciplinary studies where they progressively unravel the mechanisms underlying the functional properties of spinal motoneurons. He recently developped with Marin Manuel a new preparation allowing for the first time ever to make stable in vivo intracellular recordings of spinal motoneurons in mice. He is now studying the mechanisms of motoneuron degeneration in mutant mice exhibiting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
D. Zytnicki trained several students (Boris Lamotte d’Incamps, Jean-François Perrier, Marin Manuel) and post-docs (Lena Ting, Caroline Iglesias) who have become recognized experts.
He obtained the Foulon prize of the french Academy of Sciences for his contributions to our understanding of proprioception.

Dr. Nathalie Cartier is director of research at Inserm and is running the cell and gene therapy programs in adrenoleukodystrophy, metachromatic leukodystrophy and Alzheimer disease since 1995 at UMR745. Through her achievements in the field and active participation to many international committees in gene therapy, Dr. Nathalie Cartier has gained a worldwilde recognition in the field. Dr. Nathalie Cartier is member of the board of the European Society of Gene Therapy, The French Society of Cellular and Gene Therapy,  COSSEC (Inserm) and DIM-STEM (Stem cells and cellular medecine).

Sophie Denève, normalienne, chargée de recherche CNRS, Senior Research Fellow au Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit de l’University College London de 2002 à 2003, est aujourd’hui au département d’études cognitives de l’ENS où elle est co-responsable avec Boris Gutkin du Groupe de neurosciences théoriques, prix d’excellence Marie Curie. La Royal Society (UK) lui a décerné, en 2003, le Prix Dorothy Hodgkins.

Invitée comme conférencière dans de nombreux colloques, elle a organisé plusieurs ateliers parmi lesquels « Neural representation of uncertainty » au Neural Information processing system, Whistler, Canada, en 2003, « Computing with spikes: more than spike-counts - every spike counts? » au Cosyne 2005 à Salt Lake City, et le «UCL/ENS/CdF meeting in theoretical Neuroscience: From biophysics to computation and back » en 2006 et «Temporal processing and processing of time» au Cosyne 2008 (Utah).

Denis Hervé, ancien normalien, directeur de recherche Inserm, co-dirige avec Jean-Antoine Girault l’équipe « Neurotransmission et Signalisation» au sein de l’Institut du Fer à Moulin.

Son domaine de recherche est la neuropharmacologie et concerne les bases neuronales de l’apprentissage, de la motivation et de la récompense. Ses recherches en cours visent à mieux comprendre les mécanismes de l’addiction aux drogues et les effets de la L-DOPA chez le Parkinsonien.

Thèse avec Jean-Pol Tassin dans le laboratoire de Jacques Glowinski au Collège de France. Post-doc dans le laboratoire d’Alain Beaudet à l’Institut Neurologique de Montréal. De 1983 à 1999, chercheur dans le laboratoire de Jacques Glowinski. De 2000 à 2008, responsable de l’équipe « Signalisation des signaux dopaminergiques » dans le laboratoire de Jean-Antoine Girault (Inserm U536)

Responsable de l’animalerie de l’Institut du Fer à Moulin. Ancien membre de plusieurs comités d’évaluation de projets en Europe et en France. Membre de la Society for Neurosciences et de la Société des Neurosciences. Enseignant du Master « Biologie cellulaire physiologie pathologie » de l’Université René Descartes de 2005 à 2007. Participation à plusieurs jurys de thèse ou d’HDR.

Nicole Ropert, biologist, in collaboration with Martin Oheim, physicist, are the principal investigators of the team entitled “Biophysics of gliotransmitter release” located within the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and New Microscopy, headed by Serge Charpak, that works on the neuro-glial interactions and the neuro-vascular coupling. Since 2005, the Ropert/Oheim team has been studying the mechanisms of Ca2+-sensitive release by astrocytes in culture. We demonstrated the ability for the astrocytes to undergo lysosomal exocytosis with very slow dynamics. We are now studying the functional consequences of the lysosomal release from astrocytes in normal and pathological conditions. We use evanescent wave fluorescent microscopy to study the activity of the cellular organelles implicated in cellular metabolism (lysosomes, mitochondria) in astrocytes in culture. We also use two-photon microscopy to study the metabolic activity of astrocytes in brain slice preparations.