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 and Bruno Cauli.
• 2012: Research Masters in Cognitive Science (ENS Paris, France)
• 2010: Engineering Degree in Information Technology (Telecom ParisTech, Paris France) – Double Degree in Computer Science (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)

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. During my PhD, I pioneered the combination of functional ultrasound imaging (fUSi) to electrophysiology in freely behaving animals (Sieu et al. Nat Meth 2015) and thereby discovered extreme patterns of cerebrovascular activity during REM sleep, tightly coupled to hippocampal gamma oscillations (Bergel et al. Nat Comm 2018). As a postdoc to the Tanter Lab (now Physics for Medicine Institute) I expanded the potential of fUSi to a wide range of contexts and described the spatiotemporal dynamics of locomotion networks in the forebrain (Bergel et al. Nat Comm 2020). In 2022,  I moved to Canada as a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow at McGill (Peyrache Lab) and used calcium imaging in behaving rats to study the encoding of head direction in the retrosplenial cortex. 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 and ancient brick of sleep’s architecture. Since 2025, I am a tenured CNRS researcher and an ATIP-Avenir Emerging Group Leader at the Paris Brain Institute. I am currently combining functional ultrasound imaging with high-density electrophysiology and fiber-photometry in freely behaving mice, using this approach to study the dynamics of neural circuits during sharp-wave ripples at the whole brain scale. My lab will investigate to physiology of REM sleep, leveraging multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches to understand its neural and vascular mechanisms, in relation to emotional memory and brain clearance processes.

• Bergel, A. and Pouget, P. Combined electrophysiology and functional ultrasound imaging: Opportunities, challenges and future directions. Review Article, accepted at 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)