Christophe Bernard.

Christophe Bernard

Director of research
Institute of Systems Neuroscience

Christophe Bernard is director of research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience, INSERM U1106. His main interest is to understand brain dynamics in health and disease, with a focus on epilepsy.

He acts as a reviewing editor for Science Advances, and formerly for Science and the Journal of Neuroscience. He created and is the editor-in-chief of eNeuro, the online open-access journal of the Society for Neuroscience. eNeuro is designed to serve and educate the neuroscience community, promoting reproducibility, publishing negative results and sensitizing scientists to open science and better data interpretation with a focus on statistics and experimental bias.

Bernard obtained his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Pierre and Marie Curie University, did his postdoctoral research at the University of Southampton and spent a sabbatical at Baylor College of Medicine. He participated in the development of organic technologies to record and control brain activity, which earned him the Felix Innovation Prize, and in the development of the Virtual Mouse Brain.

Explore more from The Transmitter

Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?

Kathryn Nave explains how a concept called constraint closure may be fundamental to understanding brains, minds and cognition.

By Paul Middlebrooks
15 July 2026 | 1 min read
Soha Ashrafi photo collage art.

Making an impact through academic administration

As executive director of research at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Neurobiology, Soha Ashrafi supports more than 300 scientists, students and staff members.

By Katie Moisse
15 July 2026 | 7 min read
Illustration of birdsong, bird brain, and DNA.

This paper changed my life: Embracing an early model for naturalistic neuroscience

A 1992 PNAS paper showed how birdsong upregulates the expression of an immediate early gene in bird forebrains. The work revealed to Ribeiro the importance of studying molecular responses in naturalistic contexts.

By Sidarta Ribeiro
14 July 2026 | 4 min read