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Clémence Ligneul

Research Associate in Preclinical Neuroimaging

Beyond MRS

I am a postdoctoral research associate from the Preclinical Imaging Group, and an invited member of the WIN Physics Group. 


I am interested in the microstructural properties of the brain. I use diffusion-weighted MR spectroscopy (dMRS), a method that relies on the diffusion of different intracellular brain metabolites. Among various projects, one of my current focuses is to non-invasively probe the cerebellar microstructure in pathology (e.g. ataxia) or during development. Recently, I have shown that dMRS can track distinct trajectories of neuronal development in the cerebellum and thalamus of rat neonates. This project was awarded a WIN seed grant.

I achieved my PhD at MIRCen (CEA, France, 2014-2017), under the direction of Julien Valette, and explored the rodent brain intracellular space by developing diverse dMRS methods. We notably showed that the diffusion properties of myo-inositol reflected the astrocytic morphology.


From 2017 to 2019, I worked at the Champalimaud Foundation (Lisbon, Portugal), where I developed functional MR spectroscopy in the mouse upon visual stimulation