In the spring of 2006, I was looking forward to my first laboratory internship with one certainty: I would never be a researcher. I imagined that being a scientist was like doing practical work at university. Most of it consisted of reading a protocol like a bad recipe, without understanding why I was doing it or the role of each ingredient. From the very first day of my internship, my supervisor, enthusiastic and passionate, told me about his project like a good story. He then immediately put me in charge of a patch rig. As I observed the first GABAergic inputs received by a pyramidal cell in the rat CA3 region, I fell violently in love with this profession. Despite the ups and downs and the years of my career, this passion has never left me. I completed my thesis at the Mediterranean Institute of Neurobiology (INMED, Marseille), under the codirection of Yehezkel Ben-Ari and Rosa Cossart. There, I observed that CA3 pyramidal cells, a population of apparently homogenous excitatory neurons, were actually divided in morpho-functionally distinct subtypes rooted in different temporal embryonic origins (Marissal et al., Nature Communications; 2012). Then I moved to Geneva (Switzerland) in 2012 for a post-doctorate fellowship. With my colleagues from Dominique Müller's and Alan Carleton's lab I have shown that an impairment in the excitability of Parvalbumin-expressing interneurons caused the alteration of neuronal network synchronization in the hippocampus from mice model related to the most frequent genetic form of schizophrenia (22q11.2 DS). Furthermore, I demonstrated that restoring Parvalbumin interneuron excitability using pharmacological or chemogenetic strategies was sufficient to rescue the network dynamics in vitro and in vivo and the proper behavior (Marissal et al., Nature Neuroscience; 2018). In 2019, I have been hired as an INSERM permanent associate researcher at the INMED. With Valerie Crépel then Ede Rancz, I built a taskforce, dedicated to the study of the physio-pathological role of peculiar inhibitory and excitatory microcircuits. (Credit: Y. Bernardelli, NCCR-Synapsy).

My commitment to my taskforce are to: 

- Maintain a high scientific standard;

- Take responsibility for the well-being and safety of team members at work;

- Guarantee respect for ethics and deontology within the team;

- Ensure the team's professionalism and organization within appropriate deadlines;

- Support quality student supervision.

- Be clear about my objectives and expectations.