Nathalie L Rochefort

Nathalie L. Rochefort (born about 1979) is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh who researches neural networking processes and their implications for disorders such as intellectual disabilities, as well as how restricted caloric intake affects sensory processing.

Education Rochefort earned a bachelors degree in life sciences, with high honours, at University Paris 7 from 1995–1997. Rochefort's summa cum laude dissertation, Functional specificity of callosal connections in the cat visual cortex, was supervised by Chantal Milleret and Ulf Eysel.

Career Rochefort joined the University of Edinburgh in 2013 as a Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Integrative Neurophysiology. There, Rochefort was on the team that developed a hair-thin fiber endoscope for studying brain activity. According to Physics World, "Rochefort, the co-supervisor of the project, believes that one of the future applications of this new minimally invasive approach would be to observe neuronal activities in deep-brain structures in behaving animals. This way, neuroscientists will hopefully be able to investigate the many remaining knowledge gaps regarding memory formation and sensory perception, for instance."

Within the Simons Initiative Developing Brain Center, Rochefort leads the laboratory's focus on understanding neural networking in visual information processing, and implications for disorders such as intellectual disabilities and autism spectrum disorders. Rochefort's research has demonstrated that restricted caloric intake impacts sensory processing in male mice, and also has demonstrated the protected status of the brain during reduced caloric intake. Quanta Magazine reported that Rochefort, "thinks that the newly observed changes in how cortical neurons operate when food is scarce could affect learning and memory processes."

Awards and grants 2024: Women in Neuroscience UK Leading Researcher: Cognition and Neurodevelopment Winner 2019: European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, for "SweetVision – a project Envisioning the Reward: Neuronal circuits for goal-directed learning" 2019: EMBO Young Investigator Award 2017: The Physiological Society R Jean Banister Prize 2014 – 2021: Sir Henry Dale fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society 2013 – 2022: Chancellor's Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK 2011: Bernard Katz Lecture Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation ''