About her Postdoctoral project

Behavioral studies have shown that mice can form social memories, i.e., to remember familiar conspecifics. Recent optogenetic studies have demonstrated that assemblies of excitatory neurons in hippocampal ventral CA1 constitute a primary site of social memory. However, how selected types of social interactions (i.e., with novel vs. familiar partner) are precisely represented in ventral CA1 and whether these neural representations are altered in autism remain unknown. The project aims to use a last-generation miniature microscope to image the calcium dynamics of large neural ensembles of ventral CA1 in awake mice during a validated social interaction paradigm. Neural representations of social interactions will be explored at both individual and cell population levels, in wild type and Neurod2 KO mice, a newly-discovered autism model with social amnesia. Overall, we aim to break the neural code underlying social interaction and memory and to decipher how this code is damaged in an autistic syndrome.