BERGEL Antoine

• Since 2025: Tenured Researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS),  Paris Brain Institute - Team ‘MOV’IT: from Movement to Cognition’ (Paris, France)
• 2022 – 2025:  Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. Outgoing Phase: McGill University (Montreal, Canada), supervised by Adrien Peyrache - Return Phase: ESPCI Paris, Team Memory and Brain Oscillations (Paris, France), supervised by Karim Benchenane.
• 2021 (6 months): Postdoctoral Researcher, ESPCI Paris, Team Memory and Brain Oscillations (Paris, France), supervised by Karim Benchenane.
• 2017 – 2020: Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute Physics for Medicine (Paris, France), supervised by Mickaël Tanter.
• 2012 – 2016:  PhD Thesis, Paris Seine Biology Institute, Team ‘Neurovascular Coupling and Cortical Networks’ (Paris, France), supervised by Ivan Cohen.

I am interested in neural synchronization and how brain rhythms affect (and define) brain states, as well as the relationship between neuronal activity and hemodynamics at the physiological level. My initial background is in mathematics, physics and engineering and I gradually turned to cognitive neuroscience and eventually integrative neuroscience. During my PhD, I contributed to the early days of functional ultrasound imaging (fUSi) and was instrumental to its deployment in behaving animals simultaneously with electrophysiology (Sieu et al. Nat Meth 2015). I discovered extreme patterns of cerebrovascular activity during REM sleep, tightly coupled to hippocampal gamma oscillations (Bergel et al. Nat Comm 2018). I then moved as a postdoc to the Tanter Lab (pioneer lab of fUSi) where I expanded its potential in a wide range of contexts, such as locomotion (Bergel et al. Nat Comm 2020). I then obtained a Marie- Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow at McGill (Peyrache Lab) and ESPCI Paris (Benchenane Lab) working on high-density electrophysiology, fUS imaging and calcium imaging in behaving mice and rats, with a particular focus on sharp-wave ripple activity and retrosplenial cortex coding. With Dr Libourel, we recently demonstrated that infraslow rhythms are conserved between reptiles and mammals (Bergel et al. Nat Neuro 2025) thereby revealing a fundamental brick of sleep’s architecture, dating its apparition back to 320 million years ago. Since 2025, I am a tenured CNRS researcher and an ATIP-Avenir Emerging Group Leader at the Paris Brain Institute. My lab will investigate to physiology of REM sleep, leveraging multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches to understand its neurovascular mechanisms and functions.

• Bergel, A.and Pouget, P. Combined electrophysiology and functional ultrasound imaging: Opportunities, challenges and future directions. Review Article, Journal of Neurophysiology (2026)
• Bergel, A.*, Schmidt, J.M. *, Barrillot, B. *, Arthaud, S., Averty, L., Blumberg, M.S., Carachet, C., Clair, A., Filchenko, I., Froidevaux, C., Herrel, A., Massot, B., Rattenborg, N.C., Schmidt, M.H., Tanter, M., Ungurean, G., Libourel, P.-A., Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals. Nature Neuroscience (Dec 2025)
• Bergel, A., Tiran E., Deffieux, T., Demen´e, C., Tanter, M.*, Cohen, I.* Adaptive modulation of brain hemodynamics across stereotyped running episodes. Nature Communications, (Dec 2020)
• Bergel, A., Deffieux, T., Demen´e, C., Tanter, M.*, Cohen, I.* Local hippocampal fast gamma rhythms precede brain-wide hyperemic patterns during spontaneous rodent REM sleep. Nature Communications 9, (Dec 2018). Nature Communications, (Dec 2020)
• Sieu LA, Bergel A, Tiran E, Deffieux T, Pernot M, Gennisson JL, Tanter M, Cohen I. EEG and functional ultrasound imaging in mobile rats. Nature Methods (Sep 2015)