Molecular Cognition

Isabelle Mansuy is Professor in Molecular Cognition at the Medical Faculty of the University Zürich, and the Department of Biology of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETHZ). She will join the new Department of Health Science and Technology of the ETHZ and is part of the Center for Neuroscience Zürich. She completed a PhD in Developmental Neurobiology at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland and the Université Louis Pasteur Strasbourg, France, then a postdoctoral training in the lab of Eric Kandel at the Center for Learning and Memory at Columbia University in New York. She was appointed Assistant Professor in Neurobiology at the ETHZ in Dec 1998. Her research examines the epigenetic basis of complex brain functions and focuses in particular, on cognitive functions and behavior in mammals. Her work revealed the existence of molecular suppressors of learning and memory in the adult mouse brain, and identified the Ser/Thr protein phosphatases calcineurin and PP1 as such suppressors. It demonstrated their importance in cognitive defects associated with aging, Alzheimer’s disease and neurodegeneration. It also revealed their role in chromatin remodeling in the adult brain, and in the epigenetic control of memory formation and synaptic plasticity. Isabelle Mansuy’s research also examines the mechanisms underlying the influence of detrimental environmental factors on behavior across generations. This work recently demonstrated that early stress in mice induces depression and impulsivity, and impairs social skills and cognitive functions, and that these behavioral symptoms are transmitted across several generations. It showed that epigenetic mechanisms involving DNA methylation are associated with the inheritance of the behavioral defects. This research is pluridisciplinary and combines genetically and environmentally modified animal models, epigenetic methods, molecular, behavioral, electrophysiological, proteomic and imaging techniques.

Isabelle Mansuy is member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Science, the Research Council of the Swiss National Foundation, of the Research Council of the Fyssen Foundation and of EMBO, and was recently elected Chevalier dans l'Ordre National du Mérite in France. She is acting in multiple review boards including the European Neuroscience Institute Göttingen, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, CNRS, etc. She is chief co-editor of BioMolecular Concepts, and member of the editorial board of Hippocampus, Neurobiology of Diseases, Frontiers in Behavioral Neurosciences, Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders, and Frontiers in Epigenomics. She co-authored several reviews and books in the field of molecular cognition and neuroepigenetics.