Institut Jacques Monod seminar- Baptiste Libé Philippot

Invited by the Konstantinides Lab, Baptiste Libé Philippot will present an Institut Jacques Monod seminar on the theme:

Cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying human neuronal and circuit evolution

Abstract:

Baptiste Libé-Philippot is a CNRS Chargé de recherche and Group Leader at the IBDM (Marseille, France) since October 2024. He explores the evolution of the development and the properties of human cerebellar neurons and circuits, with the support of an ERC StG Grant (hCerebEvol). His team “Human Neuronal Evolution” performs cross-species histological comparisons of neuronal morphology, synaptic innervation and gene expression across the cerebellar development, in human and other primate species, to identify human species-specific cellular features. To explore the underlying mechanisms and their functional impact, his team uses mouse gain-of-function models as well as loss-of-function approaches in human models derived from pluripotent stem cells. This project follows a postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Pierre Vanderhaeghen (VIB – KULeuven, Belgium) in which he explored the evolutionary divergence of human cortical neurons (Libé-Philippot et al., Cell, 2023 & Neuron, 2024). This work was honored by the Awards Claude Paoletti (CNRS, 2024) and Albert Brachet (Royal Academy of Belgium, 2025).