Claire Wyart, team leader at Paris Brain Institute obtains an ERC Consolidator grant, a competitive European funding, for the scientific excellence of her research project.
Her project “Exploratome” aims now to decipher the spatiotemporal structure of motor patterns by investigating how sensory inputs can induce switch in locomotor states.
Each year the European Research Council (ERC) encourages the best scientific projects through competitive calls for proposals open to all researchers in the European Community. The ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers with at least seven and up to twelve years of experience after PhD, and an excellent scientific track record.
Claire Wyart is an Inserm research director. She started her team “Optogenetic dissection of circuits underlying locomotion” at Paris Brain Institute in 2011. She received an ERC Starting grant in 2012 for her project “Optoloco” aiming to decipher the role of sensory feedback during locomotion. Her team discovered an interoceptive sensory pathway in contact with the cerebrospinal fluid that interacts with the Reissner fiber in the center of the spinal cord to detect curvature of the spine and that in turn modulates locomotion and posture. The Wyart team discovered that this sensory system also instructs morphogenesis and tastes the content of the cerebrospinal fluid in order to detect and combat pathogens during infections of the central nervous system.