Claire Wyart

As a teenager, Claire dreamed of being a painter, a designer or an architect before developing a strong attraction to biology in high school. This passion, which has not left her since, allowed her to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Claire then went to Strasbourg for her PhD where she recreated neural networks in vitro to study the spontaneous generation of nerve activity.

After her doctorate, she flew off to Nepal and Tibet where she spent one year teaching science through experiments in local schools. After twelve months away from research, she went to the US for a postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley University to work on optogenetics, a young discipline that was still in its infancy back then. In 2011, Claire formed her own research group at the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière in Paris and became INSERM Research Director in 2017.

Her research is based on sensory-motor integration. She studies the nervous system of larvae of the transparent zebrafish, whose small number of neurons - about 200,000 - allows for quantitative biology. On issues related to locomotion and posture control, she questions the link between neuronal connectivity and gene expression. The sensory system fascinates her, especially the relation between external stimuli and the flow of internal information. But she is also interested in the individuality of the zebrafish. What differences can be observed from one individual to another? When can one talk about the expression of the fish personality?

Claire fell in love with the aesthetics of this cyprinid. "The visualization of the gene expression is, each time, a very emotional moment», she admits. She sees photography as a "great means of sharing" and regularly goes to schools to make science accessible through her images.