member

Biography

Advances in intensive care medicine have led to an increasing number of patients who survive critical illness. Acute brain injury may lead to impairment of consciousness which is challenging to assess and poorly understood. As a Neurointensivist, I have dedicated my career to deciphering the underpinnings of acute brain dysfunction in ICU patients and, to develop cutting edge tools to probe residual cognitive abilities in order to improve diagnosis, prognostic accuracy and bring treatments to patients suffering from disorder of consciousness. During my PhD I conducted research on the relationship between verbal semantic processing and consciousness, both in brain injured patients and healthy volunteers at the Brain & Spine Institute (ICM) – Paris, under the mentorship of Prof Lionel Naccache. I conducted a number of research projects explore cognitive abilities of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness using electrophysiological markers (e.g. Event Related Potentials computed from bedside scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) activity). Since 2016 I have focused my research almost exclusively on projects in acutely brain-injured patients. Under the mentorship of Prof Jan Claassen, Columbia University, I developed a number of brain imaging and quantitative EEG measures that correlate with impairment and recovery of consciousness. In particular we showed that clinically unresponsive patients can be in a “cognitive-motor dissociation” (CMD) state acutely after a brain injury and that CMD state was a potential powerful predictive marker of functional recovery. After competing my 2-year post-doctoral research fellowship at Columbia University, I came back to the Neuro-ICU at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital – Sorbonne University as an Associate Professor of Neurology, working with Prof Naccache lab as a PI at PINCLIC-Lab.