Michel Thiebaut de Schotten’s work, comprising more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, ranges from innovative neuroimaging methodologies to theories. He devotes significant effort to the clinical translation of his work, making his tools freely available to the community.
His doctoral thesis at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, published in Science (2005), showed that unilateral spatial neglect could be reversibly produced by disconnecting white matter. Today, operating theatres use his assessment to prevent spatial attention deficits after surgery.
During his post-doctorate at King’s College London, he mapped the anatomy of white matter, leading to the publication of the Atlas of Human Brain Connections. As a researcher at the Institut du Cerveau in Paris, he developed the BCBtoolkit software suite for calculating disconnections, which is available free of charge.
In Bordeaux, as head of the neuroimaging department, he explored the role of white matter connections in defining functional areas.
Recently, he published the Atlas of white matter function and a new software programme, the ‘functionnectome’, detailing the contribution of white matter circuits to function. His review in Science, published in 2022, entitled “Emerging properties of the connected brain”, illustrates his latest theoretical viewpoint.
Michel’s wife finds him amusing.
