Jean-François Démonet MD Neurologist PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience
Course and current status
Jean-François Démonet was born in 1956. He was trained as an MD and Neurologist at Toulouse University. He completed his training in Neuropsychology at Montreal University (1985-1986); in 1992 he complemented his training to brain imaging in the group of R. Frackowiak in London UK with a long collaboration since then. Recent Europe-wide activities in the domain of brain imaging of language disorders are illustrated by his responsibility in the ‘Neurodys’ project (supported by the 6th European PCRD) and more recently by his participation in the 'Pharmacog' project supported by the European Union 'IMI' program in collaboration with a consortium of major pharmaceutical companies. JF Démonet’s current position is “Directeur de Recherche (First class) ” in a French INSERM laboratory (Inserm UMR 825) in which he has been recruited in 1989 and he is currently leading a research team involving 8 permanent neuroscientists and neurologists. He will take a new position of Professor of Neurology at the University of Lausanne and the University Hospital from 2011 fall term.
Scientific summary
JF Démonet research domains concern mainly neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of language, memory and perception, in patients suffering from vascular focal lesions, degenerative diseases and developmental disorders. Aside from classical neuropsychological studies, his work involves various brain mapping methods (PET, fMRI, ERPs) to study the brain correlates of language and memory functions both in normal subjects and in patients presenting aphasia, agnosia, dementia or dyslexia. His main collaborations in France involve teams in Paris (L. Sprenger-Charolles, W. Serniclaes), Grenoble (S. Valdois), Marseille (C. Liegeois-Chauvel), mainly related to research on dyslexia. International collaborations involve diverse teams depending on specific programs; recently, Demonet’s team has been a partner of the “Neurodys” FP6 program involving 14 teams throughout Europe, a collaboration is on-going on visual agnosia with M. Goodale and J. Steeves (Ontario), as well as with S. Small (Chicago) on multi-modal remediation of speech in post-stroke aphasia. Démonet’s main research domain concerns language and include two lines of research. The first line focuses on basic processes of the ‘physiology of language’ (see for instance Démonet et al., Physiological Reviews, 2005) relating to neuroimaging studies, mainly including normal subjects. The second research line involves more disease-oriented studies in patients suffering from a diversity of neurological conditions, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease.
