Claire Wyart

Claire Julie Liliane Wyart (born 16 February 1977) is a French neuroscientist and biophysicist, studying the circuits underlying the control of locomotion. She is a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite.

Early life Wyart was born into a family of scientists. Her mother, Françoise Brochard-Wyart, is a prominent French physicist and a professor at the Curie Institute. Her father, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, was a Nobel-prize winning physicist. As their father was mostly absent, Wyart and her siblings were raised by their mother, though Claire thought of him as "the pillar who held our family together".

Education Wyart studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris. She then undertook a PhD in biophysics at the Université Louis-Pasteur (now University of Strasbourg), which she completed in 2003. she studied small networks of controlled architecture.

Research and career Wyart did five years of postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley between 2005 and 2010. Wyart's team has also demonstrated that these neurons can detect the curvature of the spinal cord.

She serves on the advisory board of Current Biology, on the board of directors of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, and on the scientific council of the Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale (FRM).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she collaborated with Marie-Claude Potier to develop a screening test for the virus using sputum and saliva samples.

Science communication and outreach While studying for her PhD, Wyart ran a science workshop for children twice a month at the Exploradome museum. With her team at the ICM, she uses zebrafish larva to teach primary and middle school children the basics of development. Human Frontier Science Program Research Grant (coordinator) (2014) Laureate, Fondation Schlumberger pour l'Education et la Recherche (2017) European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Young Investigator Award (2016) Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Kavli Scholar (2016-2020) Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) (2019) Richard Lounsbery Award (2022)

Selected publications Szobota, Stephanie, et al. « Remote control of neuronal activity with a light-gated glutamate receptor. » Neuron 54.4 (2007): 535-545. Wyart, Claire, et al. « Optogenetic dissection of a behavioural module in the vertebrate spinal cord. » Nature 461.7262 (2009): 407-410. Knowles, Roger B., et al. « Plaque-induced neurite abnormalities: implications for disruption of neural networks in Alzheimer's disease. » Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96.9 (1999): 5274-5279. Wyart, Claire, et al. « Smelling a single component of male sweat alters levels of cortisol in women. » The Journal of Neuroscience 27.6 (2007): 1261-1265. Wyart, Claire, et al. « Constrained synaptic connectivity in functional mammalian neuronal networks grown on patterned surfaces. » Journal of Neuroscience Methods 117.2 (2002): 123-131. Del Bene, Filippo, et al. « Filtering of visual information in the tectum by an identified neural circuit. » Science 330.6004 (2010): 669-673. Janovjak, Harald, et al. « A light-gated, potassium-selective glutamate receptor for the optical inhibition of neuronal firing. » Nature neuroscience 13.8 (2010): 1027-1032. Pautot, Sophie, Claire Wyart, and Ehud Y. Isacoff. « Colloid-guided assembly of oriented 3D neuronal networks. » Nature methods 5.8 (2008): 735-740. Warp, Erica, et al. « Emergence of patterned activity in the developing zebrafish spinal cord.» Current Biology 22.2 (2012): 93-102. Del Bene, Filippo, and Claire Wyart. « Optogenetics: a new enlightenment age for zebrafish neurobiology. » Developmental neurobiology 72.3 (2012): 404-414.