Fabian Wagner

Trained first as an engineer and then as a neuroscientist, I conduct research at the intersection between Neuroscience and Neuroengineering. I am interested in understanding how the dynamics of neuronal networks become altered in neurological disorders or after injury, and how to restore their natural behaviour using neuromodulation approaches.

During my Ph.D. at Brown University (USA), working with Profs. Arto Nurmikko and Wilson Truccolo, I developed new tools to record and stimulate the brain simultaneously and investigated the cortical dynamics that underlie the transition to epileptic seizures in rodent models and epileptic patients. During my postdoctoral work with Prof. Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), I pioneered neuroprosthetic technologies to restore locomotion, first in non-human primates (Nature 2016; Nature Protocols 2018), and then in patients with chronic spinal cord injury as part of a first-in-human clinical trial (Nature, 2018, Nature Medicine 2022).

In 2020, I was awarded a Neurocampus chair for young group leaders funded by the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region and the University of Bordeaux, which allowed me to create the “Neuromodulation and Neuroprosthetics” team at the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases. Our goal is to expand neuroprosthetic systems beyond their current applications in motor disorders, towards neurocognitive impairments. I recently obtained a permanent position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and an ERC starting grant to pioneer these approaches in non-human primates.