Armelle Rancillac earned her PhD in Neuroscience in 2003 at Paris VI, while working with Francis Crépel and Hervé Daniel on synaptic plasticity using patch-clamp recordings on cerebellar slices. In her dissertation, she described for the first time, several forms of synaptic plasticity between stellate cells and parallels fibers.
Then, she joined Jean Rossier’s laboratory at the ESPCI-ParisTech, as a postdoctoral fellow, to study the neurovascular coupling within the cerebellum. She demonstrated that stellate and Purkinje cells dilate and constrict, respectively, neighboring blood vessels. In 2006, she obtained a research post at Inserm and focused on the vasomotor control of intracortical blood vessels by interneurons. Combining patch-clamp, RT-PCR, videomicroscopy and Neurolucida reconstructions, she characterized the roles of different interneuron subpopulations in the neurovascular coupling of the mouse somatosensory cortex.
In 2011-2015, she studied the role of metabolism on neuronal activity and blood vessel tonus within the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO), a key brain structure triggering non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. In 2014, she got my Habilitations to conduct research (HDR).
She is currently conducting research in Rouach's team at the Collège de France to determine how neuron-glia communication contributes to the regulation of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep in VLPO.
