Nathalie L. Rochefort
Neuroscientist
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Through Memory and Perception
Education
Rochefort earned a bachelors degree in life sciences, with high honours, at University Paris 7 from 1995–1997. From 1997–2001, Roquefort took a masters in biology and biochemistry, at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, with honours, and a masters in Epistemology and History of Sciences, University Paris 7, with high honours. Rochefort completed a Ph.D. in the International Graduate School of Neuroscience at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2007. Rochefort's summa cum laude dissertation, Functional specificity of callosal connections in the cat visual cortex, was supervised by Chantal Milleret and Ulf Eysel.
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Career
Rochefort joined the University of Edinburgh in 2013 as a Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Integrative Neurophysiology. There, Rochefort was on the team that developed a hair-thin fiber endoscope for studying brain activity. According to Physics World, "Rochefort, the co-supervisor of the project, believes that one of the future applications of this new minimally invasive approach would be to observe neuronal activities in deep-brain structures in behaving animals. This way, neuroscientists will hopefully be able to investigate the many remaining knowledge gaps regarding memory formation and sensory perception, for instance."
Within the Simons Initiative Developing Brain Center, Rochefort leads the laboratory's focus on understanding neural networking in visual information processing, and implications for disorders such as intellectual disabilities and autism spectrum disorders. Rochefort's research has demonstrated that restricted caloric intake impacts sensory processing in male mice, and also has demonstrated the protected status of the brain during reduced caloric intake. Quanta Magazine reported that Rochefort, "thinks that the newly observed changes in how cortical neurons operate when food is scarce could affect learning and memory processes."
Rochefort also chairs the Wellcome Trust Brain and Behavioural Sciences Early-Career Advisory Group that shortlists candidates for Wellcome Early-Career Awards.
Awards and grants
- 2024: Women in Neuroscience UK Leading Researcher: Cognition and Neurodevelopment Winner
- 2019: European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, for "SweetVision – a project Envisioning the Reward: Neuronal circuits for goal-directed learning"
- 2019: EMBO Young Investigator Award
- 2017: The Physiological Society R Jean Banister Prize
- 2014 – 2021: Sir Henry Dale fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society
- 2013 – 2022: Chancellor's Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK
- 2013: Schilling Research Award of the German Neuroscience Society 2013
- 2011: Bernard Katz Lecture Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- 2006: Research prize from the French national association for the blind and visually–disabled people (FAF)