Fekrije Selimi is a team leader at the CIRB-Collège de France since January 2011. She trained at the École normale supérieure, and as a PhD student at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris in the laboratory of Pr. Jean Mariani where she worked on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration in the Lurcher mutant mouse model. After securing a Human Frontier Science Program fellowship, she joined the laboratory of Pr. Nathaniel Heintz at the Rockefeller University in New York where she developed a new strategy to address the question of synapse diversity in the mammalian brain and performed the first purification of a single synapse type from the mouse brain. Her team has discovered and characterized new molecular pathways with roles in synapse formation and plasticity and potential implications in various neurodevelopmental disorders.
She is the recipient of the 2010 Boehringer Ingelheim FENS award, of an ATIP-AVENIR grant 2011 and an ERC Consolidator grant 2016. She is an ambassador for the ALBA network for equity and diversity in brain sciences and the president of the France Cerebellum Club.
