Claire Wyart

In 2011, she started her own lab at the Institut du cerveau et de la moelle épinière (ICM, Brain and Spine Institute) in Paris. Wyart has received international funding for her research, from bodies such as the European Research Council, the Human Frontier Science Program and the National Institutes of Health. Her team investigates how neuromodulatory pathways of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) affect locomotion and posture. Her lab has three main areas of research: the effect of neuromodulation and peptide release on reticulospinal neurons, and on neurons in contact with the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF); the links between CSF and body axis formation and scoliosis; and new strategies to treat spinal cord trauma. In an interview in 2015, she explained that her aim was to understand how to reactivate motor circuits in humans.

Wyart did five years of postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley between 2005 and 2010. She worked for a year in Noam Sobel's lab, investigating the effects of smelling compounds in body secretions. She then worked in Udi Isacoff, using optogenetics — the modulation of neuronal activity using light — to study the control of behaviour in zebrafish larvae.

Wyart studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris. She then undertook a PhD in biophysics at the Université Louis-Pasteur (now University of Strasbourg), which she completed in 2003. Working in the lab of Didier Chatenay, she studied small networks of controlled architecture.

Claire Julie Liliane Wyart (born 16 February 1977) is a French neuroscientist and biophysicist, studying the circuits underlying the control of locomotion. She is a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite.