PhD laure

Laure Nolfo, PhD studies

Laure enrolled in the Masters program at the Universite Cote d'Azur, especializing in Neuroscience. For her M1 intership, she joined our lab to study reward and aversion processing in the laterodorsal tegmental nucleus. She used behavioral tests paired with histological analyses to understand how different aversise or rewarding stimuli activate this brain region. 

For her M2 intership, she was awarded a Mobility Grant (UniCA), to join the lab of Silvana Valtcheva at the University of Cologne, Germany. There she used fiber photometry techniques to unravel the brain circuit responsible for maternal behaviours. 

In 2024 she was awarded a National PhD scholarship to re-join our lab. For her PhD studies, she focuses on the brain-heart axis. She is using in vivo telemetry recordings and optogenetics to assess how emotional regulation strategies influence physiological heart responses (e.g., heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure) in male and female mice.  Adiotionally, she's interested in the interaction between past exposure to chronic stress, emotional regulation capacity, and cardiovascular outcomes.