When "Decoding Body Language" Becomes Serious Science: How Posture and Spine Shape Reflect Our Inner States

Event Date
Speaker
Claire Wyart
Online Talks
When "Decoding Body Language" Becomes Serious Science: How Posture and Spine Sh…

Interoception represents a fundamental pathway through which the nervous system monitors our internal states. The cerebrospinal fluid—a complex solution that bathes and protects our brain and spinal cord—serves as more than just a protective medium. Just as medical doctors perform spinal taps to diagnose infections or neurological diseases, we have discovered, using transparent larval zebrafish as a model system, that the body possesses its own system for detecting changes in cerebrospinal fluid to regulate posture, movement capabilities, innate immunity, and morphogenesis. Claire Wyart will discuss how small neurons in the spinal cord act as sophisticated mechanosensors to detect spinal compression and modulate appropriate responses. This opens new avenues for understanding how our bodies integrate internal conditions with external physical expression.

Speaker Bio
Dr. Claire Wyart is an Inserm director of research at the Paris Brain Institute, where she has led her team since 2011. Eager to quantify neuronal communication dynamically, Claire pursued undergrad studies in STEM and graduated in 2000 from the École Normale Supérieure d'Ulm, Paris. In 2003, she completed a PhD in a physics laboratory at the University of Strasbourg where she developed fluorescent recordings of neuronal network activity. Moving to UC Berkeley for her postdoc in 2005, she was one of the first to use light to manipulate the activity of neurons in vivo. As a pioneer in the emerging field of optogenetics, she used this approach to discover a novel sensory system within the spinal cord. Leveraging the transparency of larval zebrafish, her signature lies in deploying cutting-edge optical technologies to investigate neural activity throughout the body during movement, yielding insights into the structure of sensory and motor circuits in vertebrates.


Claire is deeply committed to science outreach and training of young researchers in science. Claire Wyart's contributions have earned her international recognition, including the Robertson Prize from the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF, 2016), membership of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO, 2019) and the Richard Lounsbery Prize awarded by the French and American National Academies of Sciences (2022).