Muriel Darnaudery

Muriel DARNAUDERY earned her PhD in neurosciences and pharmacology in the laboratory headed by Prof. M. Le Moal at the University of Bordeaux (France) in 1998. She subsequently joined the laboratory of Prof. Luis Miguel Garcia-Segura in the Insituto Ramon y Cajal (CSIC, Madrid, Spain), where she did her postdoctoral work. In 2000, Prof. Muriel Darnaudery was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Lille (France) in the team of Prof. S Maccari. She was then promoted to Full Professor at the University of Bordeaux in 2009.

Prof. Darnaudery is working on the hypothesis of the developmental origin of adult health and diseases using an integrative approach. She is an expert in behavioral neurosciences and early life stress and perinatal nutrition. Her research is dedicated to the exploration of the role of early-life environment, in particular early-life adversity (nutrition, maternal obesity, maternal diabetes, maternal stress) on brain functions and vulnerability to neuropsychiatric diseases in offspring. Her work shows that adverse early-life events (both during pre- and postnatal periods) increase the allostatic load and programme the brain vulnerability to stress later in life. She also explores the causal role of gut-brain dysfunctions (gut microbiota dysbiosis and gut leakiness) in the emergence of deficits associated with early-life stress.