Alexandre Baffet

Alexandre Baffet is a Group Leader in the Cell Biology and Cancer Unit (UMR144) at Institut Curie, Paris, France, where he heads the "Cell Biology of Mammalian Neurogenesis" team. He completed his PhD in 2010 at Institut Jacques Monod (University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris) under Antoine Guichet, studying cell polarity and cytoskeleton organisation in Drosophila. He then joined Richard Vallee's laboratory at Columbia University, New York, as a postdoctoral researcher (2011-2016), where he identified mechanisms of nuclear migration in neuronal progenitor cells. In 2016, he was appointed as INSERM investigator and established his own team at Institut Curie. His laboratory studies the cell biology of radial glial cells, the neural stem cells that generate neurons and glia in the developing cerebral cortex, with a particular focus on polarized intracellular trafficking, cytoskeleton organisation, and the human-specific features of cortical neurogenesis. Combining live imaging of brain tissue, cerebral organoids, and comparative approaches across species, his team investigates how these progenitor cells divide, migrate, and adopt different fates, and how their dysfunction contributes to brain malformations or cancer. In 2023, he was awarded the Impulscience grant from the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller, and in 2026 an ERC Synergy grant to support this research.