Organisers

Faculty

Alfonso Araque
Cajal Institute - CSIC
Madrid, Spain

Alfonso Araque is Research Professor at the Cajal Institute in Madrid, Spain. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1993 in Biological Sciences at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He did his postdoctoral research with Dr Phil Haydon at the Iowa State University, Ames, USA, from 1996 to 1999, studying astrocyte-neuron communication in cultured cells. He established his independent laboratory in 2001 at the Cajal Institute, where he is studying the properties and mechanisms of the reciprocal communication between neurons and astrocytes. He is Coordinator of the Biomedicne area of the National Agency for Evaluation and Prospective in Spain, Vice-President of the Spanish Society for Neuroscience and Editorial board member of Cell Calcium, Frontiers in Neuroenergetics. His major contributions include: the first demonstration of astrocyte-induced slow inward currents (SIC) mediated by calcium and SNARE-protein dependent glutamate release from astrocytes; the ability of astrocytes to discriminate between the activity of different synapses and to integrate those inputs, which indicate that astrocytes show integrative properties for synaptic information processing; the existence of new forms of neuron-astrocyte signaling mediated by endocannabinoids; the ability of astrocytes to regulate synaptic transmitter release at single hippocamapal synapses; the existence of a form of long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic transmission induced by the temporal coincidence of astrocytic and postsynaptic signalling; the ability of endocannabinoids to potentiate synaptic trasnmission through stimulation of astrocytes; and the involvement of astrocytes in the cholinergic-induced LTP in vivo.

Giorgio Carmignoto
CNR Istituto di Neuroscienze
Padua, Italy

Dr Giorgio Carmignoto is group leader at the Institute of Neuroscience which belongs to the National Research Council (CNR), the main public research organization in Italy. He is also associated with the Department of Experimental Biomedical Science of the University of Padova. The central theme of his research is the specific signalling between neurons and astrocytes investigated by laser-scanning microscope living cell imaging and patch-clamp recording techniques. Among obtained results are the first evidence for the ability of astrocytes i) to be activated by neurotransmitter synaptic release in slice preparations ; ii) to work as principal mediators of neurovascular coupling; iii) to generate neuronal synchrony by acting on extrasynaptic NMDA receptors. His research is now focused on the role of astrocytes in epilepsy.

Tommaso Fellin
Dept of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies
Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)
Genoa, Italy

Tommaso Fellin is currently assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. The research activity of his laboratory focuses on the study of cortical microcircuits and on the development of innovative methods to probe their function. Using mainly the neocortex as a model system, he is interested in understanding the mechanisms through which information is processed at the level of the individual elements of brain circuits including neurons, interneurons and glial cells. His laboratory investigate how the activity of individual cellular elements contribute to network dynamics, in which ways population activity is regulated by specific cellular subpopulations and how the disregulation of these processes may lead to pathological states of the brain as, for example, epilepsy.
To achieve these goals, he uses state-of-the-art approaches including cell type-specific optogenetic manipulations, patch-clamp recordings and two-photon microscopy in vivo and in brain slice preparation. Given that what we know about brain networks is limited by current methodologies, his laboratory also develops new and more accurate optical tools for the investigation of cortical microcircuits. He uses structured light by means of liquid crystals spatial light modulators and digital micromirror technology to illuminate cellular networks with high spatial and temporal resolutions. He aims at combining these novel approaches with genetically-encoded molecules to probe and manipulate neuronal circuits with high spatial specificity.

Frank Kirchhoff
Dept of Molecular Physiology, Institute of Physiology
University of Saarland
Homburg, Germany

Frank Kirchhoff is Chair of the Department of Molecular Physiology at the University of Saarland in Homburg, Germany. He studied biochemistry at the University of Hannover, received his PhD degree in neurobiology from the University of Heidelberg and habilitated in biochemistry at the Free University of Berlin. After postdoctoral periods at the University of Heidelberg and the Max-Delbrück-Centrum for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, he started his research group ‘Glial Physiology and Imaging’ at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, Department of Neurogenetics in Göttingen in 2000. In 2009, he was appointed as full professor at the University of Saarland. He is Editorial Board Member of GLIA and Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy. His research addresses the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neuron-glia interactions using transgenic mouse models and in vivo-imaging. He developed a series of transgenic mice with cell-type specific fluorescent protein or inducible cre DNA recombinase expression in various glial cells. These mice appeared as valuable tools to study the structural dynamics of glial cells and the function of glial transmitter receptors in vivo.

Giovanni Marsicano
Neurocentre Magendie - INSERM
Bordeaux, France

Dr. Giovanni Marsicano is a tenured researcher at Inserm. He leads the group “Endocannabinoids and Neuroadaptation” at the NeuroCentre Magendie, an INSERM and University of Bordeaux Research Center devoted to neuroscience. Dr. Marsicano is a Veterinary Medicine Doctor as formation. After the Verterinary diploma, he worked on research related to Embryonic Stem Cells from farm animals and to xenotransplantation models in Italy for 4 years. He then moved to the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich for a PhD student position, where he initiated the work on the role of type-1 cannabinoid receptors (CB1) and of the endocannabinoid system (ECS) in brain physiology, which since has been his main research interest. The subject of his PhD thesis was the generation of conditional mutants for CB1 and anatomical and functional studies on the mechanisms of action of the ECS. After PhD graduation in 2001, he made two post-doc periods in Germany and moved to Bordeaux in 2006 (recruited as senior scientist in 2007) to lead his independent research group. He is member of the SfN, the French Society of Neuroscience, the International Cannabinoid Research Society (ICRS) and of the International Society of Neurochemistry (ISN). By using conditional mutagenesis in mice and behavioral, biochemical and electrophysiological tools, his work contributed defining the role of CB1 in specific cell populations in learning and memory, food intake and energy balance, anxiety, stress-coping and others. Through a clear bottom-up scientific approach, these studies allowed exploring some general principles of brain functioning, such as the balance between excitation and inhibition, the interactions between the brain and the periphery, the importance of energy metabolism in brain functions and, more recently, the interaction glial-neurons. In 2012, by generating conditional mutant mice lacking CB1 receptors from GFAP-positive cells, he contributed to define the role of astroglial CB1 receptors in the working memory effects of cannabinoids and on their in vivo electrophysiological correlates. Since then, the role of astroglial CB1 receptors became one of the most important lines of research in his group.

Keith Murai
McGill University Health Centre
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Keith Murai is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. He holds a Canada Research Chair, and he is an EJLB Scholar. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego and did his postdoctoral training at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla. His research program is focused on understanding signaling pathways that underlie the development and plasticity of synapses and the contribution of astrocytes to synaptic properties in the CNS. His research group applies innovative molecular, biochemical, electrophysiological, optogenetic, and imaging approaches to study these processes in the hippocampus and cerebellum.

Stéphane Oliet
Neurocentre Magendie - INSERM
Bordeaux, France

Dr Stéphane Oliet is a tenured Research Scientist of the CNRS. He is heading a laboratory in the NeuroCentre Magendie, an INSERM and University of Bordeaux Research Center devoted to neuroscience. He obtained a PhD in Neurosciences from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 1994. His PhD thesis was focused on the mechanism of intrinsic osmoreception in hypothalamic neuroendocrine cells. He then achieved a postdoctoral training at UCSF as a Human Frontier Science Organization fellow in the group of Roger Nicoll where he studied different forms of hippocampal synaptic plasticity. In 1997, he was recruited as a junior faculty in Bordeaux to study synaptic transmission and plasticity in the hypothalamus. He became group leader in 2007 and Deputy Director of the NeuroCentre Magendie in 2009. Since 2008 he is an acting administrator of the University of Bordeaux. He also serves as a section editor in Neuroscience and he is a board member of the French Neuroscience Society and the Société de Neuroendocrinologie. He recently organized the bi-annual meeting of the French Neuroscience meeting in Bordeaux (1200 participants) and organized several symposia at national and international meetings. His research is focused on the contribution of glial cells to synaptic functions. In particular, he studied the role played by astrocyte-derived D-serine at gating NMDA receptors and, consequently, at regulating synaptic plasticity in different structures including the hippocampus and the hypothalamus.

Vladimir Parpura
UAB Department of Neurobiology
Birmingham, AL, USA

Vladimir Parpura, MD, PhD, holds both a medical degree, awarded from the University of Zagreb in Croatia in 1989, and a doctorate, received in Neuroscience and Zoology from Iowa State University in 1993. He has held faculty appointments at the Department of Zoology and Genetics, Iowa State University and the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, University of California Riverside. He is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology, University of Alabama Birmingham, as well as a Full Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, University of Rijeka, Croatia. He has been elected as a Member of Academia Europaea (MEA) in 2012. His current research includes: i) studying the modulation of calcium-dependent glutamate release from astrocytes in health and disease; ii) visualization of vesicular/receptor trafficking; iii) examination of the nature and energetics of interactions between exocytotic proteins using single molecule detection approaches; iv) development of scaffolds and dispersible materials, most notably modified carbon nanotubes, which can be used in repair after brain injury and v) bio-mimetic micro-robotics. He has been interfacing neuroscience with nanoscience/nanotechnology, synthetic biology and biomedical engineering.

Frank Pfrieger
Inst Cell Integr Neurosci (INCI)
University of Strasbourg
Strasbourg, France

Frank Pfrieger, PhD, is tenured group leader at the Institute of Cellular and Integrative Neurosciences, which is part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), a French governmental research organisation. He studied biology at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and worked in the lab of H.D. Lux at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Martinsried (Germany) on his thesis project, the mechanisms of GABAB receptor-mediated presynaptic inhibition. In 1994, he obtained his PhD from the University of Konstanz. For his postdoctoral training, he joined the group of B. A. Barres at Stanford University (CA, USA), where he started to study neuron-glia interactions. In 1997, he became independent group leader at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. In 2001, he was recruited by the German Max-Planck Society to establish a research group in Strasbourg (France) as part of a cooperation with the CNRS. Since 2005, he is tenured scientist of the CNRS. His research addresses the roles of glial cells in the retina with a focus on cholesterol metabolism and SNARE-mediated transport processes. His major contributions are the discoveries that glial cells promote synapse formation and that neurons depend on cholesterol delivery by glial cells. Moreover, his group developed several models to study neuron-glia interactions in vitro and in vivo, the latest being a transgenic mouse to block SNARE-dependent release in glial - or other - cells of interest.

Gian Michele Ratto
NEST - Scuola Normale Superiore
Pisa, Italy

Gian Michele Ratto graduated in Physics at the University of Genoa and received his post doctoral training in Berkeley (with Roger Tsien) and in Cambridge (with Peter McNaughton). After a lectureship at the University of California in Davis he became tenured scientist at the Institute of Neuroscience in Pisa. He moved to the Physics laboratory of Scuola Normale in 2008 where he heads the in vivo imaging laboratory. The lab is interested in the cellular mechanisms at the basis of synaptic plasticity in physiological and pathological conditions using two photon imaging, electrophysiology and targeted delivery of genetically encoded sensors as principal tools of the trade.

Richard Robitaille
Dép. de Physiologie Université de Montréal
Montréal, QC, Canada

Richard Robitaille is a Professor in the Département de physiologie at Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada. He is also a Chercheur-National of Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec. He received his Ph.D. in 1989 in Neurobiology at Université Laval with Dr Jacques P. Tremblay. He did his post-doctoral training with Dr Milton P. Charlton in the Department of Physiology at the University of Toronto from 1989 to 1993. He then started his independent research activities in 1993 at Université de Montréal where he stayed since. He received number of national and international awards at all stages of his career. He is an associate editor at European Journal of Neuroscience and an editorial board member of Neuron-Glia Biology. His research focuses on the role of glial cells in the regulation of synaptic functions in normal as well as in pathological conditions. He uses mammalian neuromuscular junctions and acute brain slices as experimental models. He addresses the role of glial cells in the regulation of basal synaptic transmission and the regulation of synaptic plasticity. He also studies the contribution of glial cells in the outcome of synaptic competition and during aging.

Nathalie Rouach
CNRS UMR 7241/ INSERM U1050 College de France
Paris, France

Nathalie Rouach is a Research Director at Inserm and leads the group “Neuroglial Interactions in Cerebral Physiopathology” in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology in College de France (Paris, France). She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris) in 2002, where she studied the contribution of astrocytic gap junctional communication to neuroglial network interactions. She then joined from 2002 to 2005 the laboratory of Roger Nicoll at University of California San Francisco as a postdoc, where she unraveled novel molecular mechanisms of glutamate receptors trafficking and their involvement in hippocampal synaptic plasticity. In 2005, she was recruited as a tenured scientist in College de France to investigate the role of astroglial networks in synaptic transmission and plasticity. Her research recently unraveled the role of astroglial networks in sustaining neuronal activity through delivery of energy metabolites, as well in scaling synaptic activity and plasticity by controlling potassium and glutamate uptake. Using multidisciplinary approaches combining electrophysiology, imaging, molecular biology and mathematical modeling, her group now focuses on the role of astrocytes in synchronous physiological and pathological network activities in situ and in vivo.

Andrea Volterra
Dép. Biologie Cellulaire et de Morphologie
Université de Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland

Over the past 15 years, an increasing number of observations have progressively modified the classical view according to which glial cells are support cells in the brain, assuring optimal functioning of neurons but with no direct role in the neuronal network activity and, ultimately, in the performance of the brain. The recognition that astrocytes, the preponderant glial cell type in the brain, possess active properties, e.g. the competence for regulated release of "gliotransmitters", including glutamate, has opened the way to a new understanding of the role of astrocytes. Today astrocytes are envisaged as local communication elements of the brain, able to generate a variety of regulatory signals and to bridge structures (from neuronal to vascular) and networks otherwise disconnected from each other, thus playing specific and essential roles both in physiology and in an increasing number of diseases. Our lab has provided some of the seminal evidence concerning the active communication properties of astrocytes and their contribution to normal and pathological brain processes (Bezzi et al., Nature, 1998; Bezzi, Domercq et al., Nature Neurosci., 2001; Bezzi et al., Nature Neurosci., 2004; Jourdain et al., Nature Neurosci., 2007; Santello et al., Neuron, 2011). Work in the lab currently focuses on: 1. the role of bidirectional communication between synapses and astrocytes in synaptic physiology; 2. the structural-functional basis of the astrocyte-synapse cross-talks; 3. the role of an altered synapse-astrocyte partnership in the progression of brain pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease. We mostly utilize functional approaches, combining patch-clamp electrophysiology and dynamic imaging, including two-photon microscopy, in acute brain slices, as well as morphological imaging and immunochemistry at the optical and electron microscopic level.

Robert Zorec
Molecular Cell Physiology & Cell Engineering
University of Ljubljana
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Robert Zorec is Professor of Pathophysiology at the University of Ljubljana, Medical Faculty. He is a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Academia Europaea (Lond.). He was a PhD student at the NewCastle-upon-Tyne Medical Faculty, UK and at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He did a post-doc as a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Cambridge and started his own laboratory in 1991 at the Institute of Pathophysiology, Medical Faculty in Ljubljana. This lab merged with the labs at the Celica Biomedical Center, Technology Park in 2000 and by establishing the Carl Zeiss Reference Center for Confocal Microscopy (1999 and 2006). His research interest has been electrophysiology and cell physiology where he developed independently of the Nobel Laureate Erwin Neher in Goettingen the high-resolution membrane capacitance measurements to study elementary properties of exocytosis, involving the fusion of vesicle membrane with the plasma membrane. As model systems he used single pituitary, mast, liver, neurones, plant protoplasts, adipocytes and other cells. His recent interest is vesicle traffic and regulated exocytosis in astrocytes, where the lab developed new optical methods to study subcellular vesicle traffic, single cell metabolism and secondary messenger activation. In addition to basic research focusing into physiological and pathological problems, the lab is also developing advanced cell-based medicines such asb hybridoma cells to treat cancer. The labs operate as GMP facilities and are compliant with ISO/SIST 17025 standards.

Executive Board

Alfonso Araque
Cajal Institute - CSIC
Madrid, Spain

Giorgio Carmignoto
CNR Istituto di Neuroscienze
Padua, Italy

Richard Robitaille
Dép. de Physiologie Université de Montréal
Montréal, QC, Canada

Permanent Advisory Board

Eleonora Aronica
Dep. (Neuro) Pathology Academisch Medisch Centrum
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Vincenzo Crunelli
School of Biosciences - Cardiff University
Cardiff, United Kingdom

Jochen Deitmer
FB Biologie, Universitaet Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern, Germany

Tommaso Fellin
Dept of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies
Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)
Genoa, Italy

Douglas Fields
Nervous System Development & Plasticity Section
National Institutes of Health, NICHD
Bethesda, MD, USA

Christian Giaume
INSERM U840 - Collège de France
Paris, France

Philip Haydon
Dept Neuroscience -Tufts University
Boston, MA, USA

Hajime Hirase
RIKEN Brain Science Institute
Saitama, Japan

Helmut Kettenmann
Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC)
Berlin, Germany

Baljit Khakh
Brain research Institute - UCLA
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Frank Kirchhoff
Dept of Molecular Physiology, Institute of Physiology
University of Saarland
Homburg, Germany

Pierre Magistretti
Brain Mind Institute, EPFL
Lausanne, Switzerland

Ken McCarthy
Department of Pharmacology
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Eric Newman
Department of Neuroscience
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Stéphane Oliet
Neurocentre Magendie - INSERM
Bordeaux, France

Vladimir Parpura
UAB Department of Neurobiology
Birmingham, AL, USA

Frank Pfrieger
Inst Cell Integr Neurosci (INCI)
University of Strasbourg
Strasbourg, France

Dmitri Rusakov
UCL Institute of Neurology
University College London
London, United Kingdom

Christian Steinhäuser
Institute of Cellular Neurosciences
University of Bonn Medical School
Bonn, Germany

Alexander Verkhratsky
Faculty of Life Sciences
The University of Manchester
Manchester, United Kingdom

Annamaria Vezzani
Department of Neuroscience
Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research
Milan, Italy

Andrea Volterra
Dép. Biologie Cellulaire et de Morphologie
Université de Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland

Robert Zorec
Molecular Cell Physiology & Cell Engineering
University of Ljubljana
Ljubljana, Slovenia