Brief Biography
Serge Laroche is Director of Research at CNRS and director of the Laboratory of Neurobiology of Learning, Memory and Communication at University of Paris-Sud. He received a PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience in 1981 from University of Paris-VI where he worked on the functional role of hippocampal long-term potentiation in learning and memory at CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette. Recipient of the CNRS silver Medal, he moved to University of Paris-Sud in Orsay in 1992. His research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and of memory formation. The approach, from genes to function, is directed to the identification of cellular and synaptic changes underlying learning and memory, and to the functional characterisation of the role of signalling cascades, transcriptional regulators, and the regulation of genes and proteins underlying different phases of plasticity and forms of memory. Research in his team cover different facets of plasticity and memory, ranging from synaptic mechanisms to neurogenesis, complemented by the analysis of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory dysfunction associated with neurodegenerative and genetically-based neurological diseases. Serge Laroche is also director of the GDR NeuroMem, a CNRS unit that assembles 25 teams in the field of the neural bases of learning and memory.