NEWS
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Emmanouil Dermitzakis – “Producing Something Together is so Rewarding!”
Emmanouil Dermitzakis is from Heraklion in Greece. After studying biology at the University of Crete, Emmanouil completed a PhD in genetics at Penn State University. He then joined the University of Geneva as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory led by Stylianos Antonarakis. Emmanouil left the Swiss City in 2001 to set up his own laboratory at the Sanger Institute, a leading genomics center based near Cambridge, before returning to Geneva in 2009 as a full professor in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development in the Faculty of Medicine. Emmanouil’s laboratory works on genetic variants and their causality link with complex diseases such as diabetes or cancer. He has been an affiliated member of Synapsy since 2018 and is keen to help the consortium with his expertise on genetic variants. We met him on the margins of his seminar during the last annual retreat in Villars.
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Denis Jabaudon – Synapsy is Developing a Common Culture
Denis Jabaudon is a professor of neuroscience and current director of the Department of Basic Neuroscience at the University of Geneva. He is also an attending physician in the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG). Professor Jabaudon trained as a medical doctor at the University of Lausanne before doing a PhD at the University of Zurich. He subsequently undertook his internal medicine and neurology residency before becoming a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. Denis came back to Switzerland in 2008 to launch his own lab, trying to combine his interest in neuronal circuits, synaptic physiology and brain development.
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Nathalie Ginovart – Translational Research Using Neuroimaging
Nathalie Ginovart uses neuroimaging as a research tool to investigate mental disorders and as a way of bringing the clinical and fundamental worlds closer together. Nathalie Ginovart started by studying biology before continuing with a master’s in pharmacology followed by a M.Phil. in integrated biological systems – which is when her interest in the brain began to deepen. “I was exposed to studies on epilepsy, depression and schizophrenia. I soon wanted to do neuroscience so I could have a better understanding of the brain mechanisms involved. The brain seemed to me to be like a black box that wasn’t very accessible.” A thorough training combined with a passion for the brain meant that Nathalie decided to undertake a doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Lyon in France.
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Empowerment: Three Questions for Bita Moghaddam
Bita Moghaddam is a full professor at Oregon Health and Science University where she holds the Chair of the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience. In the past 26 years, she focused her research on the modeling aspects of psychiatric disorders. Last March, she participated in the Synapsy-LWiN career lunch with students of the Department of Basic Neurosciences of the University of Geneva and took time to answer our questions about gender bias in academia.
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Radio show with Marie Schaer
Every Friday, the CQFD swiss radio show receives a scientist to talk about his or her work and research. The 6th of September 2019, the journalist Adrien Zerbini invited Marie Schaer, Synapsy member, professor at the University of Geneva, and head of the Centre de consultation spécialisé en autisme (CCSA) of Geneva. One hour to discover Marie Schaer and talk about eye tracking techniques, Early Start Denver Model program and brain imaging in the field of autism spectrum disorders. Radio show CQFD – RTS la 1ère >
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Early social contingencies impairment
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social and communication deficits, repetitive behaviors, and restricted interests. Literature shows that atypical neural processing of social visual information contributes to impaired social cognition. However, evidence for early developmental alterations in neural processing of social contingencies is scarce since most studies have been conducted in older children and adults. The group of Marie Schaer, Professor of Neurosciences at the University of Geneva and member of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Synapsy, aimed to investigate alterations in neural processing of social visual information in children with ASD compared to age-matched typically developing peers. To this aim, they used a combination of high-density EEG and eye-tracking in 2–5 years children. Schaer’s experimental approach is unique and results were published last week in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. They suggest that impairments in brain regions involved in processing social contingencies are present from an early age in ASD.
