Marco Pompili

I recently finished my PhD with Sidney Wiener as advisor, within a collaboration with Thérèse Jay’s lab at Sainte-Anne hospital. I am currently wrapping up my PhD work before leaving for postdoc research.

I am ultimately interested in the dynamics allowing the exchange of information between brain areas, namely how the information encoded in one neural structure is able to modulate the encoding in another area (and the other way around), and how these interactions orchestrate perception, learning, and behavior. To do so, my primary experimental approach is  to perform high-density recordings simultaneously in multiple brain sites of freely behaving rats and then use data mining and analysis to study neural populations activity.

Brief bio

Born and bred in Rome, I studied undergraduate biology at Università di Pisa and Université Paris-Saclay. I then pursued with master studies in neuroscience at École Normale Supérieure, Sorbonne Université, and University College London.

During my undergraduate I received extremely valuable training in Kate Jeffery lab at UCL. After a tour of different neuroscience research fields,  I finally decided to come back to study systems/behavioral neuroscience in rodents, and joined for my PhD the labs of Sidney Wiener and Michaël Zugaro at the Collège de France, and of Thérèse Jay and Marie-Odile Krebs at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne.

You can download my full CV here.

Neurotree

Current projects include:

• Looking at the sleep reactivation of fear extinction learning cell assemblies in the medial PFC, we’re pinpointing at a potential mechanism of differential consolidation of memory traces in the dorsal vs. ventral mPFC that may support successful conditioned fear extinction [with Ralitsa Todorova et al.; see FENS 2020].
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• We aim at studying the functional relevance of cell assemblies in cross-structural communication and at showing evidence for ‘reader’ neurons responding to cell assembly activations in the cortico-amygdalar circuit [with Céline Boucly, Ralitsa Todorova, et al.; see FENS 2020].
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• We are developing a novel algorithm to accurately and precisely detect cell assemblies, which allows us to detect virtually all cell assemblies in a given recording [with Gabriel Makdah, Ralitsa Todorova, et al.; see NCCD 2019].
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• We developed a new ecologically relevant extinction training protocol for rats in a large open field arena and we are showing that it allows to reveal inter-individual differences in conditioned fear recovery and relapse [with Fanny Demars et al.; see GDR Psychiatrie 2017].

S Trouche, MN Pompili & G Girardeau (2020) The role of sleep in emotional processing: insights and unknowns from rodent research. Current Opinion in Physiology 15: 230-237.

MT Pasquet, M Tihy, A Gourgeon, MN Pompili, BP Godsil, C Léna & GP Dugué (2016) Wireless inertial measurement of head kinematics in freely-moving rats. Scientific Reports, 6: 35689.

Google scholar

Contacts

Sample channels of a 256 channel wide-band recording in the prefrontal cortex (light blue), mediodorsal thalamus (yellow), dorsal hippocampus (red), amygdala (purple), and ventral hippocampus (green) during slow-wave sleep.

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