Dr. Francesca Sargolini
Professor, Aix-Marseille University
Postdoctoral Researcher, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
PhD, Sapienza University
When Dr. Francesca Sargolini was young, she harbored a fondness for ants. Whenever she saw a parade of ants streaming along the ground, she would place an obstacle in their path and watch as they recalculated their route. This interest in animal behavior—and the brain activity that underlies it—has been a driving force in Francesca’s career. Today, she is a Professor at the Laboratory of Cognitive Neurosciences at Aix-Marseille University in France. She leads a team working to uncover the neuronal basis of spatial cognition.
From an early age, Francesca loved to learn and had wide-ranging interests, including a love for ancient languages. However, influenced by her long-standing fascination with animal behavior, she chose to study biology as an undergraduate at Sapienza University in Rome. At first, her dream was to become an ethologist—a scientist who studies animal behavior. She was particularly interested in the emergence of complex behavior from smaller interactions between individuals: how did global rules of behavior come to exist? However, in talking through some of these ideas with her professors and peers, a new goal began to form in Francesca’s mind: she wanted to study not only the behavior itself, but also its underlying processes in the brain.
Finding a lab where she could do behavioral neuroscience research proved challenging, as most of the work being done at her university focused more on cellular and molecular processes. However, she found a small group looking at pharmacological influences on spatial behavior and started working towards a master’s degree. Specifically, Francesca investigated what role subcortical structures like the basal ganglia nuclei might play in spatial navigation. She became invested in the project and continued working towards a PhD in the same lab. While she found the research stimulating, the resources were sometimes lacking, and space was a particular issue. At one point, frustrated with not being able to get enough time in the behavior room, Francesca devised a solution. She placed an “out of order” sign on one of the bathrooms in the building and refitted it for her behavior experiments. Some of her colleagues may have wondered why the bathroom took a few months to be repaired, but meanwhile Francesca was collecting valuable data without disruption.
During her PhD, Francesca wanted to broaden her perspective by gaining experience abroad and therefore did a bulk of her experiments in a collaborator’s lab in Toulouse, France. In her graduate work, Francesca set out to dissociate the roles of two types of glutamate receptors—AMPA and NMDA—in the nucleus accumbens during memory consolidation. She trained mice in a spatial memory task and then injected either AMPA or NMDA antagonists into the nucleus accumbens after training (during the memory consolidation phase). She found that blocking NMDA, but not AMPA, receptors in the nucleus accumbens during consolidation reduced the retention of spatial memory. Thus, her work not only helped solidify the importance of the nucleus accumbens in memory processing but also elucidated the particular receptors involved.
As she neared the end of her PhD, Francesca realized that, while she loved the scientific questions she was asking, she wanted to explore methods other than pharmacology for answering them. She hoped to find a postdoctoral position where she could learn electrophysiology and listen to neurons communicating in real time. When she came across a job announcement for a postdoctoral position in the lab of Edvard and May-Britt Moser at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, she thought it could be a great fit. The Mosers were not famous at the time, but Francesca recognized their names as she had read about a new odor-based version of the Morris water maze that they had developed. She applied for and was offered the position and headed to Norway, not realizing that she was about to become part of a historic scientific breakthrough.
As Francesca started her postdoc with the Mosers, the group had already begun to define what would ultimately become known as “grid cells,” cells in the entorhinal cortex which form a topographic, directionally oriented map of the animal’s spatial environment. While the initial work on these cells had been from superficial layers of the entorhinal cortex, Francesca became interested in characterizing grid cells in the deeper layers. She discovered that, while layer II was composed mostly of grid cells, the deeper layers contained grid cells, head-direction cells, as well as cells that responded to both position and direction. Additionally, Francesca found that running speed modulated the activity of these cell types. Her work thus advanced understanding of how an animal might update its representation of spatial coordinates while navigating its environment. In 2014, the Mosers won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of the grid cell, and Francesca’s work is cited as one of the key publications supporting this revolutionary discovery in the field of spatial navigation.
As she wrapped up her postdoc in Norway, Francesca was sure that she wanted to continue on the academic path. She had friends who had gone into industry, but she could not imagine surrendering full control of her research direction to the interests of a company. Thus, she applied for independent positions and received an offer from Aix-Marseille University. Francesca was thrilled to be starting a group of her own, but there was another major source of excitement that came with the job offer: sunshine. She had found the dark winters in Norway particularly brutal, even with the sun lamp that the Mosers had gifted her. In fact, she was so thrilled to have the offer that she spent a bit too long at the beach in Marseille and missed her flight back to Norway!
The job offer was for an Assistant Professor position, which in France comes with a rigid—and quite high—requirement of 192 teaching hours. That first year, she was drowning in teaching and had almost no time to devote to what she really wanted to do: research. She thought she might have made a mistake becoming a professor. Even when she did have time for research, she felt ashamed of her slow progress. That first year, she could not record a single grid cell as she was adjusting to the new recording system and its different components. With time and patience, however, Francesca hit her stride. The lab began producing data, and she grew to love the teaching aspect of her job. She is now the director of the master’s program at Aix-Marseilles and finds great joy in watching the students grow as scientists and move on to exciting futures.
As she looks to her own future, Francesca is clear on one thing: she wants to do more research and deal with less bureaucracy. She is therefore planning to step back from her official role as group leader, allowing a more junior PI in the group to have the title. With less administrative work on her plate, Francesca is excited to spend more hands-on time in her lab, including investigating a question that has been forming in the back of her mind for many years: can a rat calculate the linear distance to an object, and then infer a new trajectory to the same object through a circular, rather than direct, path? In a way, Francesca is still asking the same questions that have motivated her since she was a child watching ants recalculate their spatial trajectories. Now, however, she has a career full of experience and knowledge with which to tackle this question and any others she may dream up.
Find out more about Francesca and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with Francesca on November 14, 2023 below!
