Nathalie Rouach is a neurobiologist developing research on the role of glial cells in brain physiology and pathologies. She is a Director of Research at Inserm.
She received in 2002 her Ph.D. in Neuroscience, performed jointly at University Pierre and Marie Curie and the Weizmann Institute, where she studied the contribution of astrocytic gap junctional communication to neuroglial network interactions. She then joined the laboratory of Roger Nicoll at University of California San Francisco as a postdoc, where she worked on glutamate receptors trafficking and synaptic plasticity.
She now runs the laboratory « Neuroglial Interactions in Cerebral Physiopathology and Pathologies » within the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology at the Collège de France. The research of her laboratory aims at determining whether and how astrocytes play a direct role in information processing. In particular, the laboratory explores the molecular modalities and functional consequences of neuron-glia interactions in various physiological and pathological contexts, such as memory, social interactions, epilepsy or intellectual disability, with ex vivo and in vivo studies of neuronal excitability, synaptic transmission and plasticity, synchronization of neuronal networks, and cognitive functions in mouse models or human tissues.
