For the past 25 years, Laurent Cognet, physicist, has played a leading role in the development of single-molecule microscopy for neuroscience. For example, in 2003, he detected and revealed for the first time the movement of single molecules in the synapses of living neurons.
More recently, by combining the approaches of nanoscience and super-resolution microscopy, he has shown how to access the architecture of the brain’s extracellular space and the movement of molecules within it.
Over the years, these activities at the optics-neuroscience interface have been carried out in close collaboration with Neurocampus colleagues, in particular L. Groc (IINS) and E. Bezard (IMN), with whom he was awarded an ERC SYNERGY funding in 2020. Extending the approaches developed by his laboratory to the VBHI institute is therefore a natural step.
With Laurent, coffee is serious business… as much as wine, some would say; also, he handles his cameras with a passion… for creating images.
