Charlotte Boccara
Norwegian Centre for Molecular Medicine, Oslo
“Hippocampal and Cortical Dynamics across Learning and Developmental sleep”
Abstract: This talk is about cortico-hippocampal dynamics occurring during sleep both in development and during learning. Making memories can be described as a two-step process. Step one is the learning – or encoding of new information in a temporary storage – the hippocampus . The information can be completely new or can be a modified new version of an already stored mnemonic trace. Step two is the consolidation of such newly learnt information and their transfer into a long-term storage in the cortex, where it will be accessible for later recall if a need arises. Such transfer of information is thought to heavily relies on a good dialogue between the hippocampus and the cortex, especially during sleep. While the two-stage memory model is widely recognized, we have very little data on (i) what mechanisms support information update, (ii) how and when the hippocampo-cortical dialogue happens and (iii) how it affects the memory neural code. To finally bridge this important knowledge gap, we have concomitantly recorded from the CA1 region of the hippocampus and the medial entorhinal cortex of rats while they learn new goal locations, sleep and have their memory tested after.
Bio: Dr Charlotte Boccara is a French-Norwegian neuroscientist. After completing her undergrads in Paris (Paris-Sorbonne, Pitié-Salpêtrière), she undertook her PhD under the supervision of Edvard and May-Britt Moser at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). There she contributed to the discovery of border cells and grid cells in the pre- and para-subiculum (Solstad 2008, Boccara 2010). In 2013, she joined Jozsef Csicsvari group at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria (ISTA) where she participated to evidence autonomous replay in the medial entorhinal cortex (O’Neill 2017) as well as goal remapping of grid cells (Boccara 2019). This was followed by a short stay at King's College London where she worked on neurodevelopmental disorder models. In 2019, she moved to the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences in Oslo to lead projects on spatial neural codes during exploration, sleep and development (Spalla 2022). In 2022, she was appointed as a group leader in Precision Medicine at the Norwegian Centre for Molecular Medicine, an EMBL partnership node and in 2024 she was awarded an ERC starting grant to study the role of sleep in cognitive development. Dr Boccara research is built at the junction of Systems Neuroscience and Developmental Biology. Her group aims to uncover some of the mechanisms occurring while we sleep that are crucial to healthy development.