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

Two trajectories cross over each other showing areas of alignment and misalignment.

Mind over metrics: How can we tell if two brains (or AI models) are alike?

The ability to record from large populations of neurons has triggered the development of myriad methods for comparing them. But we’re still grappling with how to convert measures of likeness into a better mechanistic understanding.

By Alex Williams
17 August 2026 | 7 min read
Mice playing, engaged in learning and memory: some of their brains are yellow, and some are red, matching a red and yellow legend that runs through the image to underscore both memory and learning.

This paper changed my life: A technical breakthrough for memory studies

In a 2007 Science paper, Mark Mayford and his colleagues found that some neurons activated during learning are also recruited during memory retrieval. Noelia Weisstaub shares how this study and others drove an era of great progress in tool development.

By Noelia Weisstaub
14 August 2026 | 5 min read

Early experience reshapes zebrafish retinal cells, alters behavior

The cells undergo a classic form of plasticity previously thought to occur only in downstream visual circuits.

By Siddhant Pusdekar
13 August 2026 | 0 min watch