Presidential Lecture
The space of actions – Neural circuits for transforming spatial representations into actions
Marco Tripodi
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK
Marco Tripodi gained his MSc and PhD at the University of Cambridge. During his PhD, under the supervision of Michael Bate, he characterised mechanisms of motor circuits assembly and the molecular underpinnings of activity-dependent dendritic remodelling. He was awarded an EMBO fellowship to work with Silvia Arber with a joint appointment at the University of Basel and the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research. There Marco pioneered the development of novel viral strategies to visualise and manipulate neural circuits in vivo and characterised fundamental aspects of the spinal network controlling locomotion. He is currently a Senior MRC Principal Investigator at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. His lab studies circuit mechanisms underlying motor control and the link between motor and cognitive functions. Marco’s lab also continues to develop advanced methods to access, visualise and manipulate neural circuits in vivo. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2015 and subsequently an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2021.
Cognition and behavior
Neuronal correlates of social behavior in health and disease
Ewelina Knapska
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Dr. Ewelina Knapska has been a group leader at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw since 2012. In 2013 she was promoted to Professor of the Institute, and since 2018 she has been vice-President of the Centre of Excellence for Neural Plasticity and Brain Disorders (BRAINCITY). Her research aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms controlling social interaction and emotion-related learning. She was one of the first to describe sharing others’ emotions and their brain correlates in rodents (Knapska et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006). This discovery has started a new line of research on the brain mechanisms underlying socially transferred emotions and social learning. In 2016 she was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to study functional connectivity of the amygdala in social behavior. With the behavioral protocols and c-fos-dependent tracing of functional connectivity of activated neurons (Knapska et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012) she developed, she has shown that reading the emotions of others can provide information about the proximity of danger and that distinct central amygdala circuits are recruited by socially signaled imminent and remote danger (Andraka, Kondrakiewicz et al. Current Biology, 2021). She has also studied the role of the central amygdala circuits in learning, discovering that matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9)-related circuits are indispensable for reward learning (Knapska et al., J. Neurosci. 2013; Puscian et al., Br J Pharmacol., 2021), in particular for approach motivation (Lebitko et al., BiorXiv preprint), which suggests the target of selective treatment. Accordingly, she has recently shown that normalizing MMP-9 activity in the central amygdala rescues impaired reward learning in the Fragile X syndrome model (Puscian et al., Mol. Psychiatry).
Development
Molecular mechanisms linking the development and evolution of the human cerebral cortex
Pierre Vanderhaeghen
VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research, Leuven, Belgium
Pierre Vanderhaeghen obtained MD and PhD degrees at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. After a postdoctoral stay at Harvard Medical School, he came back to Brussels to start his own lab, until he moved recently as a Professor at the VIB KULeuven Center for Brain and Disease, Belgium. Pierre’s work has been recognized by several international awards including the Remedios Caro Almela Prize in Developmental Neurobiology, the Roger de Spoelberch Prize for neurological diseases, and two ERC Advanced Grants.
His research is focused on the mechanisms of development and evolution of the cerebral cortex. His lab pioneered stem cell-based models of cortical development, which revealed the key influence of intrinsic properties of neural stem cells and neurons on human brain evolution. His most recent scientific contributions include the identification of the prominent role of human-specific genes in cortical neurogenesis, and the discovery that mitochondria and metabolism act as drivers of the species-specific timing of neuronal development.
Sensory and motor systems
Implantable and wearable neurotechnologies to understand and restore neural functions
Silvestro Micera
The Biorobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy
Silvestro Micera is currently Professor of Bioelectronics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA, Pisa, Italy) and at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Lausanne, Switzerland) where he is holding the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Translational NeuroEngineering. He received the University degree (Laurea) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pisa, in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in 2000. From 2000 to 2009, he has been an Assistant Professor of BioRobotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. In 2007, he was a Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA with a Fulbright Scholarship. From 2008 to 2011 he was the Head of the Neuroprosthesis Control group and Group Leader at the Institute for Automation, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, CH. He was the recipient of the “Early Career Achievement Award” and of the “Technical Achievement Award” of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in 2009 and 2021, respectively.
Dr. Micera’s research interests include the development of neuroprostheses based on the use of implantable neural interfaces with the central and peripheral nervous systems to restore sensory and motor function in disable persons. In particular, he is currently involved in translational experiments for hand prosthesis control in amputees, and the restoration of vestibular function, grasping and locomotion in different neurological disorders.
He is author of more than 300 WoS peer-reviewed papers and several international patents. He is currently Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering and of IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics. He is also member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation, and of Journal of Neural Engineering.
Excitability, synaptic transmission, network functions
Neurocircuitry of social motivation in health and disease
Camilla Bellone
Department of Basic Neurosciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Camilla Bellone is Associate Professor at the Department of Basic Neuroscience of the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and coordinator of the Synapsy Center for Mental Health Research. She trained in neuroscience between the USA (UCSF, postdoctoral fellowship) and Europe (Italy and Switzerland, Ph.D. and senior research assistant), and she established her laboratory in Switzerland in 2014. She has been interested in understanding how defined neural circuits give rise to social behavior for several years. She has published over 40 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, and over the last five years, she has more than 20 invited talks worldwide. In the previous five years, her laboratory has contributed to investigating the role of Dopamine neurons in social interaction using in vivo and in vitro electrophysiological approaches, optogenetic and chemogenetic control of specific circuits, and behavioural analysis. Furthermore, her lab has contributed to dissecting the reward system’s role in autism spectrum disorders.
Microglia in the healthy and diseased brain
Rosa Chiara Paolicelli
Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Rosa C. Paolicelli received a Bachelor degree in Medical Biotechnology at the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2006, and a MSc in Molecular Neuroscience at the University of Bristol, UK, in 2007.
She completed her predoctoral studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Italy, where she obtained a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2011. She moved then to Switzerland, to work as a postdoc at the University of Zurich, in the Department of Systems and Cell Biology of Neurodegeneration. Since 2018, Rosa is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Sciences at University of Lausanne, where she leads the Microglia Biology lab. Her research focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the specific microglial contribution to brain functioning, in physiological as well as pathological contexts.
