Virginie Van Wassenhove

Virginie van Wassenhove is a French cognitive neuroscientist known for her work on how our brains perceive time and the integration of information across senses. She is the director of research at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission and a team leader at INSERM's Neural Imaging Unit.

Education and career van Wassenhove received her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park's Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences program in 2004. During her graduate school research, she worked on audiovisual speech processing. Following her PhD, she spent some time as a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco working on auditory learning and plasticity. In 2008 she moved to France where she joined the Neurospin as well as the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit so that she could build and head the Neurospin MEG lab. By 2012, she had become an INSERM group leader and by 2013, she was director of research at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. As of 2026 she works at the Frederic Joliot Institute for Life Sciences in the area of cognition and dynamics.

Research van Wassenhove's research examines how the brain uses different sensory modalities to examine the world. She has shown that people's ability to process sound is more efficient when their eyes are open. In a 2007 paper for the Neuropsychologia, she demonstrated the existence of an asymmetric, 200 millisecond integration window for auditory and visual signals from speech through 2 experiments with 43 participants. She has also worked on how our subjective perception of time is influenced by our senses and other factors.

Honors and awards She was awarded the ERC Synergy Grant for her project, "Cronology".

Selected publications