Several grants for Gisella Vetere

In 2018, Gisella Vetere was appointed professor at ESPCI Paris – PSL, at the Brain Plasticity Unit. In 2020, she won three grants for her promising work : the NARSAD BBRF young investigator grant supporting promising young scientists from all the world conducting neurobiological research, the ATIP Avenir* and the ANR JCJC (for young researchers) grants for the project ENIGMEM (see below).

Clément Pouget, José Patricio Casanova, Gisella Vetere and Charlie Andrews, members of the C4C team

« We are going to expand the team » rejoys Gisella Vetere. Once she heard about the several grants she’s just received, the new professor of the school already headed towards possibilities. New postdoc/PhD positions, a unique opportunity to develop her research on long-term memories.

« People tend to remember only relevant aspects of life events. Notably, fear experiences, are preserved over time but their spatial details are lost. Where does this contextual information go?
Memory consolidation is a gradual process that creates a strongly wired network of brain regions that allows for the later retrieval of memories. We hypothesize that this consolidated network interferes and inhibits other circuits, including the spatial representation system to allow a faster and more accurate recall of consolidated fear memories.
In the ENIGMEM project, we will identify key regions of the memory network and test whether they regulate spatial representation circuits and test whether the neurons encoding the spatial information during the traumatic event become silent during remote memory recall. Altogether, this project will significantly further our understanding of how networks are reconfigured during the stabilization of fear memories over time ».

In addition to her research, Gisella also teaches a new course in neurosciences for engineering students, some of which already discovered the lab during an internship.

*ATIP Avenir and ANR JCJC grants can not combine, and Gisella has chosen the ANR one, but her team will be labeled ATIP Avenir anyway.