The Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL) bring together the multidisciplinary expertise of ~450 members to decipher brain organization, cognitive functions, mental states, and related brain disorders.
The neural substrates of brain functions, including perception and action, attention, memory and learning, sleep and vigilance, emotion and social cognition, are investigated along two entwined strategic directions: from genes and cells to behavior and cognition, and from bench to patient.
Aiming at a comprehensive understanding of these complex brain functions, a multiscale integrated approach is pursued in animal models and humans, covering many facets in the field of Integrative, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience. Our aim is to link this knowledge with the production of new diagnostic markers and innovative therapies.
Currently the CRNL is structured in 14 teams and 9 platforms located in the Lyon East Hospital Pole, a unique site combining medical care, basic and clinical research, and high-tech technological platforms. 9 teams and 6 platforms are hosted in the "Neurocampus Michel Jouvet" building since Feb. 2019.
Professor Michel Jouvet was an internationally renowned neuroscientist from Lyon, a sleep specialist who discovered REM sleep (1959), and a visionary of Lyon's neurosciences...
He was the driving force behind the Institut Fédératif des Neurosciences de Lyon, a network of research laboratories set up in 1995, with the ultimate aim of creating a Neuroscience Research Center grouping these laboratories at the Pôle Hospitalier Est.
"...it seems imperative that brain science should be built like the object it studies: speed of transmission and chance encounters are incompatible with the dispersal of researchers to the various suburbs of a city. By living in the same place, the chances of contact, information and, above all, meeting from different horizons in the same forum appear to be one of the essential conditions for success, one of the other conditions being, of course, the pooling of powerful, costly and unique analysis equipment...".
Pr Michel Jouvet, December 1987
Pr François Mauguière paid tribute to him in May 2023.