Direction

The laboratory is directed by Claire RAMPON and Raphaël JEANSON.

Claire RAMPON

Director

 
After a PhD in Neurosciences in Michel Jouvet’s lab in Lyon (1997), Claire Rampon joined the team of J.Z. Tsien at Princeton University-USA for her post-doctorate. There she studied the contribution of hippocampal NMDA receptors to memory processes using transgenic mice.
 
Appointed associate professor at Paris XI University in 2000, she started characterizing the role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in memory process.
In 2005, Claire Rampon joined the CNRS and integrated the Research Center on Animal Cognition (CRCA) in Toulouse.
 
Today, she is Research Director at CNRS and the current Director of the CRCA in the Centre for integrative Biology (CBI). Her research aims to characterize cerebral plasticity underlying learning and memory functions in the healthy brain and in mouse models of pathologies associated with memory dysfunction (such as Alzheimer's disease). Precisely, her interest focusses on the role played by adult-generated hippocampal neurons in memory formation and how endogenous neural stem cells from the adult brain can be manipulated to become new neurons that drive cognitive rehabilitation.

Raphaël JEANSON

Deputy-director

 

Raphaël Jeanson obtained a PhD in ethology in 2003. After two post-doctoral fellowships abroad, he was recruited as a research fellow at the CNRS and joined the CRCA in 2005. He is currently Director of Research at the CNRS and deputy director of the CRCA.

 

His research focuses on the study of social behaviours in arthropods. His work combines experimental and theoretical approaches to identify the behavioural rules involved in the maintenance of social cohesion, the production of cooperative behaviours and the transitions between different levels of social organization. He is particularly interested in understanding the role of behavioural variability in the emergence of division of labour in colonies of social insects. Another part of his research is devoted to social transitions in spiders.