Neurobinar #3: December 17th at 4pm on Zoom

Christelle Baunez obtained her PhD in Neurosciences from the University of the Mediterranean under the supervision of Marianne Amalric and entitled “Excitatory amino acids and dopamine in the basal ganglia: contribution to the performance of a conditioned motor task in rats“. She then studied the behavioural effects of manipulations of the subthalamic nucleus (NST) in intact or parkinsonian rats. She pioneered the study of NST involvement in non-motor processes during her post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. Trevor W Robbins at the University of Cambridge (UK) from 1996 to 1997. She showed that NST injury affects the attentional and control processes of inhibition. At the end of 1997, she obtained a position as a Research Fellow at the CNRS, LNCF in Marseille. She then began to study the role of NST in motivational processes, showing that NST injury or high-frequency stimulation of NST reduces motivation for cocaine while increasing motivation for food. This led her to propose the inactivation of NST as a surgical strategy in the treatment of addiction. She is currently leading projects in rats, monkeys and humans. Today DR1 CNRS, she leads the BAGAMORE team (Basal Ganglia, Motivation and Reward) at the Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone in Marseille.

Christelle has published 61 international articles and 8 book chapters. She has received several awards and funding (ANR, FRM, NIDA, EraNet, France Parkinson, A*MIDEX), has been invited to speak at 65 international and 29 national congresses. She has supervised 7 theses. She has been President of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Biological Sciences of the CNRS, is Vice President of the Scientific Council of France Parkinson and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychopharmacology.