IBI-3 Seminar: Valentin Saunier

Seminar&Webinar

of

Invited Postdoc Candidate Talk:

“From chemistry to neurotechnology engineering, a story of interfaces.”

Speaker: Valentin Saunier , LAAS (France)

Date: 31 January 2022

Time: 11:00

Venue: on-line (*)

(*) - For on-line participation contact f.santoro@fz-juelich.de.

Abstract:

As the growing world population is aging, brain-related disorders and diseases are expected to bear an increasing cost for our societies, thus a better understanding of the brain in both its healthy and diseased states will be needed in the hope of preventing or curing them. Ideally, studies should be conducted in free-moving patients to obtain results in conditions as close as possible to the normal state of any patient. However, most well-established research techniques to study the brain or neurons (MRI, patch-clamp) are not compatible with moving subjects and only study one aspect of the brain total activity, driving the growing interest into implantable platforms and multilevel studies. Here is presented a new platform designed to meet these requirements, an implantable multi-electrode array capable of both electrophysiological (recording and stimulation) and neuroelectrochemical studies at the single electrode level, while being biocompatible and flexible. The key feature of this new platform is the new microelectrode type, a PEDOT-carbon nanofiber nanocomposite, displaying low impedance, high surface charge injection and high electrochemical performance. This combination of properties allow for electrophysiological recording combined electrochemical sensing of neurotransmitters. This new paradigm is capable to provide valuable information about the correlation between the electrical and neurochemical activities of the brain.

Bio.:

Valentin SAUNIER is a researcher working at the interface between engineering and neurosciences, on neurotechnology development with an emphasis on multifunctional implantable microelectrode arrays. He got its PhD on this subject in 2021 at LAAS-CNRS (Toulouse, France) after getting a double master degree in chemistry-biology-health and biomolecular engineering. He started working on neural interfaces during a 6-month internship at UC Davis in California under Prof.Seker supervision, where he worked on nanoporous gold in-vitro neural interfaces.