Professor Nicolas Toni, PhD.
Obtained his PhD from the University of Geneva in 2000, in the laboratory of Professor Dominique Muller, where he worked on the mechanisms of structural plasticity involved in the expression of long-term potentiation. He then pursued his postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Fred Gage, at the Salk Institute in San Diego, where he studied adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus. He then returned to Switzerland, where he worked for 2 years in pharmaceutical companies, in the development of new drug targets for Alzheimer's disease. He has been an SNF Assistant Professor in the Department of Fundamental Neurosciences since 2010.
The main research interests of his laboratory are the mechanisms of synaptic integration of adult-born hippocampal neurons. Using viral-mediated gene-delivery tools, optical and electron microscopy, they are studying the mechanisms of synaptogenesis and their regulation by cell-intrinsic and extrinsic pathways. The structural identity of the neurogenic niche is also examined, using automated 3D electron microscopy, in an attempt understand the key factors involved in the regulation of cell proliferation in the adult hippocampus.
Professor Anita Luthi, PhD.
Anita Lüthi obtained her PhD in 1995 from the Brain Research Institute of the University and the ETH of Zürich, where she used electrophysiological methods to dissect the roles of fast and slow forms of hippocampal glutamatergic synaptic transmission. She then spent 4 years at Yale University, USA and started her interests in elucidating ionic mechanisms underlying oscillatory activity in neurons implicated in sleep rhythm generation.
From 2000 on, as a Junior Group Leader at the University of Basel, she has pioneered the consequences of sleep deprivation on glutamatergic synaptic transmission and plasticity, showing that insufficient sleep materializes at the level of the primary excitatory communication sites in the brain.
In 2008, she joined UNIL first as a Fellow of the Cloëtta Foundation, and from 2009 on, as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor. Using electrophysiological recordings in combination with viral intervention techniques, she applies her expertise in ionic mechanisms of neural rhythmicity to manipulate brain waves generated during sleep, in an effort to eventually understand sleep's beneficial functions for the brain. She was promoted to Associate Professor in March 2014.
Professor Antoine Adamantidis, PhD.
Dr Antoine Adamantidis is an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Neurology at the University of Bern and holds a joined appointment at the Dept of Clinical Research. He is the co-director for the Zentrum For Experimentale Neurologie (ZEN labs) at the Inselspital. He also has an Adjunct Professor position in the Dept of Psychiatry at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He obtains his pre- and postdoctoral education at the Universities of Liege, Belgium, and at Stanford Medical School, USA.
Dr Antoine Adamantidis's research interests aim at understanding the wiring diagram and the dynamics of sleep-wake circuits in the mammalian brain. Dr A. Adamantidis's research objectives aim at investigating the wiring, firing dynamics and plasticity of the neural circuits regulating brain states in normal and pathological states using in vitro and in vivo optogenetics - a technology that he and his colleagues pioneered at Stanford University - combined to genetics and electophysiological methods. His research program has been driven by questions such as What define a sleep/wake circuit? What is the relevance of neural discharge rate in controlling sleep-wake transitions and maintenance? How pathophysiological symptoms of sleep disorders (narcolepsy, insomnia, etc.) relate to sleep-wake circuits dynamics? In his recent work, his laboratory identified a rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep circuit in the hypothalamus that control switch and duration of REM sleep states in mammals.
Dr Antoine Adamantidis received several awards including the R. Broughton Young Investigator Award (Canadian Sleep Society), a Canadian Research Chair in Neural circuits and Optogenetics, a NIH Pathway to Independence (PI) Award-K99/R00 (USA), NARSAD and Sleep Research Society Young Investigator Award (USA).
Professor Denis Jabaudon, MD, PhD.
Denis Jabaudon, PhD, graduated from the University of Lausanne Medical School in 1995 and did his PhD in Beat Gäwhiler's lab at the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zürich, where he worked on mechanisms of synaptic plasticity using electrophyisological approaches.
Following his neurology residency at the University of Geneva, he moved to Boston where he did his postdoc in Jeffrey Macklis's lab at Harvard Medical School, where he investigated the developmental molecular controls over the differentiation of distinct subtypes of cortical neurons. He has been an assistant professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences at the University of Geneva since 2009. The main research interests of the lab are the genetic controls over the developmental connectivity of thalamic and cortical neurons, and gene-circuit interactions during development.
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