Dr. Sylvain Hugel has a dual scientific career in neurobiology and zoology. He studied biology at Louis Pasteur University (Strasbourg), where he obtained his PhD in neurosciences in 2002. During his thesis, under the supervision of Professor Rémy Schlichter, he studied inhibitory synaptic transmission and its modulation by purines in the dorsal spinal cord. During his postdoctoral fellowship (2002–2005), he studied the role of dendritic spines with Professor Anne McKinney, first in the laboratory headed by Professor Beat Gähwiler at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and then at McGill University in Montreal (Canada). Since 2005, he has been a research scientist at the Institute of Cellular and Integrative Neuroscience, a joint research laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Strasbourg. In his current research, he examines the role of short-term synaptic plasticity in the processing of potentially painful information by neural networks in the spinal cord.
