A French national, Gilles Laurent studied veterinary medicine and obtained a doctorate in Neuroethology in Toulouse. After a postdoctoral stay in Cambridge, UK, he became professor of Biology and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. In 2009, he was recruited to be a founding co-director of the new Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, where he has since headed the Department of Neural Systems.

Understanding the brain through the study of simple neural systems

The human brain is probably the most complex “machine” in the universe. With over 80 billion neurons and about as many glial cells, over 100 trillion synaptic connections and hundreds of thousands of kilometres of wiring (axons and dendrites), what may be seen as the pinnacle of biological evolution is still very poorly understood. However, precisely because it is the result of evolution, the principles of its organisation and functions — with the exception of a few, such as language, unique to our species — are found in the nervous systems of most animals.

By choosing well-adapted animal model systems and exploiting their singularity and relative simplicity, Gilles Laurent showed that these similarities in neural organisation are the result either of shared phylogenetic relationships or of functional convergence, and sometimes of both. By describing functional principles of small systems and testing them with larger or more complex systems, he provided an understanding of the diversity, or singularity, of the solutions found by evolution to solve common functions such as smelling, seeing, moving, learning, etc., and the possibility of extracting their shared principles. This approach revealed that in certain cases a common function, for example learning, can be achieved in several ways; or on the contrary, that a particular type of neural network can be used for completely different functions, for example to control a motor rhythm, or to control certain fundamental aspects of sleep.

During his career, Gilles Laurent has revealed these mechanisms and types of relationships by studying the brains of insects, cephalopods, fish, reptiles and mammals. As a result, he has touched on very diverse areas of neuroscience, ranging from network dynamics to oscillatory waves in the brain, olfactory encoding, perception of visual textures, and sleep and brain evolution. Thanks to the combination of new molecular, electrophysiological, ethological and computational techniques, his approach also initiated the development of techniques for representing and analysing multi-neuronal data and contributed to a renaissance of comparative and evolutionary functional neuroscience.

Louis-Jeantet Foundation’s selection committee:
Dario ALESSI, Geneviève ALMOUZNI, Marc DONATH, Catherine DULAC, Anne FERGUSON-SMITH, Michel GEORGES, Michael HALL, Stephen HARRISON, Marc LECUIT, Diane MATHIS, Rene MEDEMA, Paul NURSE, Peter RATCLIFFE, Caetano REIS E SOUSA, Caroline ROBERT, Alexander SCHIER, Markus STOFFEL, Antoine TRILLER, Gisou VAN DER GOOT, Juleen ZIERATH

Prof. Gilles Laurent

Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
Max-von-Laue-Str. 4
60438 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

g.laurent@brain.mpg.de
www.brain.mpg.de