About her PhD project

The team investigates the role of early neuronal activity in the maturation of neuronal circuits, focusing on the hippocampus. In mice, hippocampal neuronal dynamics switch from being driven by spontaneous movements to internally-generated within local circuits. Importantly, this transition is accompanied by a sudden rise in perisomatic axonal innervation from GABAergic interneurons, suggesting that a change in network structure could explain the change in dynamics. Our aim is to test the hypothesis that the development of perisomatic GABAergic inhibition is instrumental in this change of dynamics. We will address this question by combining optical imaging and manipulations to network modeling in order to delineate the role of inhibition in the observed dynamical regime transitions.