member

Previous page Laurent COHEN MD, PhD, PU-PH, Sorbonne University, AP-HP Team “Physiological investigation of clinically normal and impaired cognition”

Biography

Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

  • 1994 PhD, summa cum laude, (director Jacques Mehler, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France) on the cognitive mechanisms of speech perception
  • 1991 Neurology certification
  • 1988 MD, with distinction, (Faculté de Médecine Xavier-Bichat, Paris VII, France)
  • 1986 Master of Neurosciences (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI, France)
 

CURRENT POSITIONS

  • 2002 – present   Director or co-director of a cognitive neurosciences research team, currently PICNIC-Lab, Institut du  Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM), Paris, France
  • 1999 – present Professor of Neurology, Sorbonne Université Faculty of Medicine, Paris, France
  • 1993 – present Neurologist, University Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France
 

PREVIOUS POSITIONS

  • 1988 – 1992 Fellowship in the neurology department, Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris, France
  • 1998 – 2002 Member of the research unit Inserm 334 “Interface Imagerie Fonctionnelle Neurobiologie”
 

GRANTS AND AWARDS

Over and above recurrent funding from INSERM, Sorbonne Université, and ICM, I have raised funding from various sources:

  • 2020-2023 Agence Nationale de la Recherche ANR (project TOPLEX) 438 k€, with S Dehaene
  • 2018-2021 « Big Brain Theory Program » from ICM, COUNTING FLIES project, with Bassem Hassan (200 k€)
  • 2016-2019 « Big Brain Theory Program » from ICM, COGBLIND project (200 k€)
  • 2014-2017 Fondation Voir et Entendre (63 k€)
  • 2014-2017 Leshanot Chaim foundation (68 k€)
  • 2013-2014 Crédit Agricole donation (80 k€)
  • 2011-2015 Agence Nationale de la Recherche ANR, project CONSTRUCT, with Christophe Pallier (135 k€)
  • 2006-2009 Agence Nationale de la Recherche ANR, project Origins of Reading, with Stanislas Dehaene (150 k€)
 

SUPERVISION OF GRADUATE STUDENTS AND POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

Our team has hosted numerous postdoctoral fellows. I’ve been personally supervising:

  • Marcin Szwed, now adjunct professor and head of lab at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow
  •  Diana Lopez-Barroso, now permanent researcher at the University of Malaga

I have supervised 4 PhD students:

  •  Fabien Vinckier (-2012), now associate Professor of Psychiatry, University Hospital Ste-Anne, Paris, France, and Principal Investigator at the ICM, Paris, France
  • Olivier Martinaud (-2010), now Professor of Neurology, University of Caen, France
  • Sami Abboud (-2018), now researcher in the industry (data scientist, www.dtone.com)
  • Florence Bouhali (-2018), now post-doctoral fellow in Fumiko Hoeft’s BrainLENS Lab, UCSF

I supervised ~12 Master students, currently following up on their PhD, medical track, or postdoc positions.

 

TEACHING ACTIVITIES

I’m teaching cognitive neurosciences and behavioural neurology at Université Paris-Sorbonne to medical students, Master students, speech therapists; plus clinical teaching at bedside to medical students.

 

ORGANISATION OF SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS

  •  Organization of a yearly international conference on neuropsychology and cognitive neurosciences at the Salpêtrière hospital (Journées JL Signoret, 1995-2015, ~250 participants/year)
  • Member of the steering committee of the yearly European Workshop of Cognitive Neuropsychology (Bressanone, Italy)
 

PATENTS

  •  Sitt, JD, King, J.R, Cohen L., Naccache, L. & Dehaene, S. International Patent No EP13305485: “A method to Monitor Consciousness” (2013).
  • Cohen, L. International Patent No EP19305079: “Local anaesthetic for the treatment of neurological symptoms resulting from brain lesions or dysfunctions” (2019).
 

CURRENT INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES AND COMMISSIONS OF TRUST

Current responsibilities:

  • Co-supervision of a hospital unit for inpatients with neurobehavioral and cognitive disorders
  •  Behavioral neurology consultation for outpatients
  • Co-supervision of the Neuropsychology diploma (Sorbonne-Université)
  • Expert neurologist at the Paris Court of Appeals
  • Member of the scientific committee of the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants www.ose-france.org)
  • Head of the scientific committee and editorial advisor (Editions Odile Jacob)
  • Reviewer for high-impact journals including: Science, PNAS, Brain, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, J Vision, etc.

                

MEMBERSHIPS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES

  •  2000 – present Member of the Société Française de Neurologie
 

Summary of ten years track-record

For over 25 years, I have been associating research, clinical practice, and teaching in the field of cognitive neuroscience. My career evolved in the neurology department of the university hospital of the Salpêtrière in Paris, where I was appointed Professor of neurology in 1999.

 

Research work

My scientific activity has been dedicated to the study of higher cognitive functions, particularly language, reading, and mental calculation. This work resulted in over 120 international publications in peer-reviewed journals (h-index = 91, citations > 46.000). Through the study of healthy and brain-damaged individuals, using behavioural and imaging methods, I made prominent contributions to the understanding of the brain mechanisms of calculation and of reading. With my colleague S. Dehaene, we proposed the Triple-Code model of numerical cognition, largely based on the study of dissociated impairments in brain-damaged patients (see Dehaene S, Piazza M, Pinel P, Cohen L. (2003), Cogn Neuropsychol: 2829 citations). It is also based on imaging healthy subjects and neurological patients that we first identified the Visual Word Form Area (see Cohen et al. (2000), Brain: 1951 citations), then refining the understanding of its properties and impairments, using functional and anatomical imaging (see for instance Bouhali et al., PNAS 2019). I recently extended this approach to the study brain reorganization in early blind persons (Abboud et al., Cerebral Cortex 2019), music reading (Bouhali et al. 2017 & 2020, Mongelli et al. 2017), color cognition (Siuda-Krzywicka et al. Cerebral Cortex 2021). Beyond this fundamental long-term work, I studied unusual and highly informative patients, sometimes opening promising therapeutic paths (see Cohen et al. (2004) N Engl J Med; Cohen et al. (in press) Arch Clin Transl Neurol).