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Recruiting Young Researchers

Objectives

To provide job opportunities in the domain of neurological disability for our best postdoctoral researchers
To provide these post-doctoral researchers with a valuable professional experience for their future recruitments in research and higher education organizations

Impact on the Neurodis research teams

To reinforce human resources of the teams by allowing them to set up specific research projects

Young researchers recruited by Neurodis in 2009

Celine Amiez's biography

After completing cellular biology and physiology studies in Grenoble University, Céline Amiez obtained her D.E.A. and her Ph.D. in Neurosciences in INSERM U371 in Bron on Dr. Jean-Paul Joseph’s team. The goal of her Ph.D. was to assess the role of two regions of the frontal cortex in decision-making processes in the primate. Her Ph.D. was achieved thanks to a doctoral scholarship from the French Research Minister.
After her Ph.D., Céline Amiez went on to pursue a post-doc at McGill University in Dr Petrides’ laboratory from 2003 to 2008. Her post-doc was made possible thanks to several post-doctoral fellowships including the Fyssen Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and finally the Coles Foundation. Since 2009, she has been a research associate at McGill University in Dr Petrides’ laboratory. In Dr Petrides’ laboratory, Céline Amiez conducted several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies aiming to assess anatomo-functional dissociations within the frontal cortex in primates. In addition, she developed new clinical functional neuroimaging tools aimed at establishing a pre-operative map of high-order cognitive functions in patients undergoing surgery for brain tumour removal.
Céline has been recruited as Young Researcher in the team of Dr Emmanuel Procyk (Inserm Unit U846, Stem-Cell and Brain Research Institute). The goal of this project is to assess the neuronal basis of decision-making processes in the primate. Céline describes her project as follows:
« Making rational decisions in everyday life is critical for our quality of life and our survival. Decision-making processes in humans are damaged in many neurological diseases such as addiction, depression, or in Parkinson disease. At the current stage of knowledge, the neuronal networks involved in decision-making processes remain poorly understood. The goal of my project is therefore to develop a primate model for the assessment of the neuronal basis of decision-making processes. This project could allow a better understanding of human neurophysiology and therefore of physiopathological mechanisms of neurological diseases in which decision-making processes are altered. »
This innovative project, supported by Neurodis Foundation for 3 years, will be done in collaboration of Rhône-Alpes teams specialized in functional neuroimaging. To conclude, Céline says: “I am glad to perform this challenging and innovative project and I would like to thank the Neurodis Foundation and Dr. Emmanuel Procyk for their support and their trust.”

Charlie Wilson's biography

Charlie Wilson comes from Preston in the North West of England, and was educated at the University of Oxford. After a degree in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology he completed a DPhil (PhD) in the laboratory of Prof David Gaffan, and then continued to work in Oxford with Prof Gaffan and also in collaboration with Dr Mark Baxter.

His research to date has been loosely based around the integration of memory into cognition, and on how the brain encodes the temporal organisation of events. This has included investigation into the roles in memory of the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex. He has also studied the contrasting networks in the brain that deal with the acquisition and retention of episodic memories.

More recently his research has focussed on the role of cortico-cortical interactions in the brain, as a way of moving beyond the understanding of the functions of single brain regions and towards the understanding of whole networks. This has included experiments on the integration of information between the two hemispheres of the brain, and also on the interaction between inferotemporal cortex and prefrontal cortex. His final project in the UK looked at the role of the interactions of parietal cortex and their role in episodic memory.

Charlie moved to Lyon in March 2010 to work for 2 years on an exciting project with Dr Emmanuel Procyk (Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute, INSERM U846), investigating the neurobiology of executive functions, in particular in relation to dopamine.

Guy Gingras's biography

Most of Guy Gingras’s training has been focused on assessing the effects of visual deprivation early in life by performing animal psychophysical experiments in attempts to re-create the ophthalmologic disease often encountered in humans during their childhood.
During his master’s studies at the University of Montreal, he showed that hamsters with experimentally-induced retinal inputs to the auditory cortex could see. Additionally, during his doctoral studies at Dalhousie University, he investigated the spatial localization abilities of amblyopic cats. Similarly to human amblyopes, the spatial localization deficits in the amblyopic animals increased with the spatial scale of the stimuli. Moreover, these deficits could not be explained by a loss of contrast sensitivity in the deprived eye.
During his first doctoral appointment at Wake Forest University, he investigated the differing impact of multisensory and unisensory integration on behavior. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania to assess visual recovery, both behaviorally and physiologically (fMRI) following retinal gene therapy in two canine models (achromatopsia, Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis).

Thanks to the support of Neurodis, he started a position in February 2010 in Dr. Howard Cooper’s research team located in Lyon (Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute, INSERM U846) where he will investigate rescue of the vision in a non-human primate model. He is very grateful to the Neurodis Foundation for giving him the opportunity to move to France and continue his research into future clinical applications of gene therapy to find cures for blindness.

Lucia Carriero's biography

After her studies in neuropsychology at University of Padova (Italy), Lucia Carriero spent a 4 years postgraduate internship at the University of Padova and at the BRAIN Lab in Trieste, where she learned to setup experimental protocols with EEG, fMRI, MEG and TMS techniques.
In 2001 she joined the group of Prof. Piero Paolo Battaglini at the Department of Physiology of the University of Trieste. In the same period she started her PhD studies in Cognitive Neuroscience at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA-ISAS). She mainly worked on visual processes and action neural correlates in healthy individuals, and among the main results of her thesis she found activations of frontal areas ipsilaterally to the response prior to execute conflicting motor choices. She also studied the involvement of parietal cortex in enhancing top-down processes in conflicting motor tasks.

In 2006, thanks to a Marie Curie grant, she joined the group of Prof. Thomas Pollmaecher at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, where she worked as post-doc with neurological patients and healthy individuals. In 2007 she moved for a secondement to the Biomedicum Center in Helsinki and, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Porkka-Heiskanen and her collaborators, she studied microdialysis in rodents models of sleep deprivation and she learned basis of High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). Back in Munich to the Max Planck Institute, she continued her project on the cortical and subcortical correlates of emotional susceptibility in narcoleptic patients, with both fMRI and ERPs techniques.

In February 2010, thanks to a fellowship of Neurodis, Lucia Carriero joined the research group of Angela Sirigu at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience (CNRS UMR 5229) to work on the neural basis of pain with intracranial EEG. When she got the news about the Neurodis fellowship, she commented: “I am so grateful to Neurodis to have the opportunity to investigate this delicate topic and I hope this technique can help us to better understand how brain elaborates everyday painful situations.”

The Neurodis Foundation would like to thank the APICIL Foundation for its Financial support on this project that perfectly meets the main theme of the APICIL foundation which is the fight against pain.