Professor Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud has been appointed as Director of the Hearing Institute, an Institut Pasteur center. She took up office on January 1, 2022 and succeeds Professor Christine Petit in the role.
Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud has been appointed as Director of the Hearing Institute, an Institut Pasteur center, for an initial five-year term, from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2026. Her appointment follows a call for candidates to direct the Hearing Institute, with applications assessed by an international selection committee, and discussions with the Fondation Pour l'Audition (partner and co-founder of the Hearing Institute) and Inserm.
As Director of the Hearing Institute, Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud is responsible for spearheading its strategic development plan and in charge of general management. Her main tasks are to develop: research in neuroscience in the field of hearing, especially by recruiting new teams; translational research; a policy of innovation and technology transfer; and partnerships with professionals in the field of hearing health.
Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud will also be in charge of a joint Inserm/Institut Pasteur research unit called "Neural Coding and Engineering of Human Speech" at the Hearing Institute.
Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud's research expertise in the field of hearing, which she will continue to exercise with her unit, is focused on the exploration of the neural mechanisms underpinning the implementation of the language processing network in the human brain. Her research team employs an approach involving bioinformatics, human neurophysiology (MEG, electrocorticography, fMRI, etc.) and neuroengineering (transcranial stimulation and neurofeedback) to identify the neural and computational determinants of speech processing and their dysfunction in hearing and language disorders such as aphasia, dyslexia, stuttering and speech reception difficulties in autism.
The Hearing Institute, an Institut Pasteur center co-founded with the Fondation Pour l’Audition and with support from the City of Paris, is affiliated with Inserm through a joint research unit and operates in cooperation with several CNRS scientists. It is the first French national research center for auditory neuroscience. Professor Christine Petit, who was involved from the very start of the project as founding Director of the Hearing Institute, is now passing on this leadership role to Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud. Christine Petit will pursue her research at an innovation laboratory within the Hearing Institute.
Professor Stewart Stewart Cole, President of the Institut Pasteur said: "I am very proud to announce the appointment of Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud who enjoys worldwide recognition for her expertise, and I would like to pay tribute to Christine Petit, a Professor at the Institut Pasteur and the Collège de France, for her major contribution which paved the way for the launch of the Hearing Institute in February 2020."
"I am extremely honored to have been chosen to carry on the Hearing Institute adventure launched by Christine Petit and generously supported by our supervisory authorities, the Fondation Pour l’Audition, Inserm and of course the Institut Pasteur. This institute dedicated to hearing and the journey from the ear to the brain is unique throughout the world and I am thrilled to be able to contribute to this endeavor," commented Professor Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud.
In 1997, Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud completed a PhD in Neuroscience in the Lyon-based laboratory for neuroscience and sensory systems. She was able to complete a post-doctoral fellowship in the United Kingdom, at University College London (UCL), after receiving a grant from the Fyssen Foundation and then a Marie Curie grant from the European Commission. She subsequently received a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a second post-doctoral fellowship in Germany, at the Physiology Department at Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 2001, she founded her own research group in the Brain Imaging Center at Goethe University, which she transferred in 2004 to the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris after being recruited as a research associate at the CNRS; she was subsequently promoted to CNRS research director in 2008. She was involved in the creation of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (U960), where she led an Inserm team from 2008 to 2012.
Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud has authored 90 scientific publications in specialist internationally peer-reviewed journals. She was awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2011 and an application for invention registration was filed for her research. She is a member of the scientific boards of several research institutions in France (Neurospin Inserm-CEA; the Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain at Aix-Marseille University) and in Switzerland (the Linguistic Research Infrastructure (LiRI) at the University of Zurich).
She is on the editorial board of three international scientific journals (Neuroimage Clinical, Neuroscience and Language, Cognition and Neuroscience).
Anne-Lise Mamessier Giraud has also co-authored several books and has written a book for a mainstream audience entitled "Le cerveau et les maux de la parole" (Editions Odile Jacob, 2017).
Photo credit : Institut Pasteur