Rosa Cossart

Rosa Cossart is the Director of the Institute of Neurobiology of the Mediterranean (INMED, INSERM U1249, Aix-Marseille University), affiliated with INSERM and Aix-Marseille University, a pioneering institute in the field of Systems Developmental Neuroscience. After obtaining an engineering degree from École Centrale Paris, she studied the functional reorganization of GABAergic circuits in epilepsy during her doctoral training under Professors Bernard and Ben-Ari. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Professor Rafael Yuste’s laboratory at Columbia University, where she was a pioneer in the use of calcium imaging to investigate the function of cortical circuits. Her laboratory has made major contributions to understanding the role of development in the construction of hippocampal circuits underlying memory function. She discovered “hub neurons,” which orchestrate neuronal synchronization, and more recently identified “neuronal assemblies” as the elementary building blocks of hippocampal circuits. Her work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the INSERM Research Prize, the FRM Grand Prize, the Life Sciences Prize of the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, and the CNRS Silver Medal. She has been awarded European Research Council funding three times and was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 2023.