Congratulations to Dr Fabien Wagner, member of the VBHI executive committee and CNRS research fellow at the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases (IMN), who has been awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal !
CNRS Bronze Medal
Each year, the CNRS highlights and recognises members of the research community for the exceptional quality of their scientific work.
The CNRS Bronze Medal recognises early-career researchers for their groundbreaking contributions, providing encouragement to continue their valuable and promising research.
A Career Dedicated to Brain Stimulation
Dr Fabien Wagner leads the “Neuromodulation and Digital Therapies” (NeuroDTx) team, which aims to develop new neuromodulation strategies to restore motor and cognitive functions in neurological disorders or after injury.
During his PhD at Brown University (USA), he combined optogenetic stimulation with microelectrode array recordings to study the mechanisms leading to epileptic seizures in rodent models of epilepsy. During his postdoc at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), he developed spinal cord neuroprosthetics to restore locomotion, first in non-human primates, and later in patients with spinal cord injuries in an initial human study (Wagner et al., Nature 2018; Rowald et al., Nat Med 2022).
In 2020, Dr Fabien Wagner joined the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases (IMN), where he established a new team called “Neuromodulation and Neuroprosthetics” to extend neuroprosthetic systems to neurocognitive disorders, thanks to funding from the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region (Neurocampus chair for young team leaders, 2020–2023) and a startup grant from the European Research Council (ERC) (2022–2027).
In 2024, he partnered with Amélie Aussel at Inria to leverage digital sciences to optimise and understand neuromodulation approaches. Their new team, NeuroDTx, then joined the VBHI institute to test the potential of new digital therapies, including non-invasive brain stimulation, to alleviate cognitive deficits in patients with neurovascular diseases.
Currently, Dr Fabien Wagner is focusing on the SHIVA-CogNeurophys study, which investigates the cognitive symptoms of cerebral small vessel disease.
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