The Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL) brings together more than 450 members with diverse areas of expertise, exploring the brain from the genetic level to cognition and behavior. It is organized into 21 research teams, including 3 emerging teams, and has 10 research facilities and technology platforms.
The CRNL conducts basic and clinical research with significant societal impact; these areas feed into one another to generate knowledge through a resolutely translational approach, for the benefit of patients and society. To achieve its objectives, the CRNL takes full advantage of a unique location that combines proximity to neurological, psychiatric, and women’s, maternal, and pediatric hospitals with state-of-the-art research facilities.
Nine research teams and six technology platforms have been housed in the “Neurocampus Michel Jouvet” building since February 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.