Caroline Apra, post-doctoral fellow in neuroscience, won the 2021 Bettencourt Young Researchers Prize for her work on neuroplasticity.

Time, a great ally of neuroplasticity

Some quickly occurring diseases that affect the brain, such as tumors or strokes, can have severe consequences on the body, like paralysis. However, lesions that gradually occur in the brain, such as tumors called gliomas, can be surgically removed without major consequences.

This suggests that recovery from brain injury depends on how quickly the injury sets in. With time, the brain finds a way to adapt. This is called neuroplasticity.

Promoting neuroplasticity in mice

In Polina Anikeeva’s laboratory at MIT, Dr. Apra will study the mechanisms allowing neuroplasticity to take place and explore whether there is a way to "prepare" the brain to avoid the negative effects that can occur after an injury.

Optogenetics, a technology available in Dr. Anikeeva's laboratory, will allow her to gradually turn off ("prepare") an area of the mouse's brain. She will compare recovery capacity after a brain injury in "prepared" and "unprepared" mice to see if her hypothesis is correct and consider whether optogenetics can be used to improve brain recovery in patients.

Caroline Apra in a few words

Caroline Apra graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique before studying medicine at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris and specializing in neurosurgery. She also has two master’s degrees: one in human genetics from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and another in Russian literature and culture from the Sorbonne.

In 2020, Dr. Apra earned a PhD at the Université Paris Saclay and the Brain and Spinal Cord Institute for her work on rare tumors of the meninges, the membranes around the brain. She studies their molecular identity and develops mouse and imaging models to understand their origin and progression better.

Young Researchers Bettencourt Prize

Created in 1990, the Young Researchers Bettencourt Prize is one of the first initiatives of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. Until 2021, this prize was awarded each year to 14 young doctors of science or doctors of medicine, to enable them to carry out their post-doctoral stay in the best foreign laboratories. 349 young researchers were distinguished. The prize endowment was €25,000.

All the award-winners