Alexandre Mourot

Alexandre Mourot was trained as a chemical biologist. His career has revolved around the development of opto-chemical tools, initially for understanding how ion channels and receptors operate at the molecular level and, more recently, for understanding what they “do for a living”. As a post-doc at UC Berkeley, he notably engineered a light-controllable local anesthetic that is selective for pain neurons, allowing pain sensation to be rapidly switched on and off. He is now a research director and group leader at ESPCI Paris. His team is developing innovative opto-chemical technologies to manipulate neurotransmission with high precision in the behaving mouse. He is combining these home-made tools, together with optical and electrophysiological readout methods, to study cholinergic and dopaminergic modulation in the context of drug addiction.