Laurent COHEN

Biography

TRAINING

• 1994 Doctorate, summa cum laude, (Director Jacques Mehler, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France) on the cognitive mechanisms of speech perception
• 1991 Certificate of Neurology
• 1988 MD, with distinction, (Faculty of Medicine Xavier-Bichat, Paris VII, France)
• 1986 Master's degree in neuroscience (Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris VI, France)

CURRENT FUNCTIONS

• 2002 - Currently Director or co-director of a research team in cognitive neuroscience, currently PICNIC-Lab, Paris Brain Institute, Paris, France
• 1999 - Present Professor of Neurology, Faculty of Medicine, University of the Sorbonne, Paris, France
• 1993 - Present Neurologist, Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, Paris, France

PREVIOUS POSITIONS

• 1988 - 1992 Internship in the Department of Neurology, Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris, France
• 1998 - 2002 Member of the research unit Inserm 334 "Interface Functional Imaging Neurobiology".

Research

Laurent Cohen's scientific work has been devoted to the study of higher cognitive functions, including language, reading and mental calculation. This work has resulted in over 120 international publications. This work resulted in more than 120 international publications in peer-reviewed journals (h-index = 91, citations > 46,000). Through the study of healthy people and people with brain injuries, using behavioural and imaging methods, Laurent Cohen has made important contributions to the understanding of brain mechanisms of calculation and reading. With S. Dehaene, Laurent Cohen proposed the Triple-Code model of digital cognition, largely based on the study of dissociated impairments in brain injury patients (see Dehaene S, Piazza M, Pinel P, Cohen L. (2003), Cogn Neuropsychol: 2829 citations). It is also from the imaging of healthy subjects and neurological patients that they first identified the area of the visual form of words (see Cohen et al., (2000), Brain: 1951 citations) and then refined the understanding of its properties and alterations, using functional and anatomical imaging (see for example Bouhali et al., PNAS 2019). Laurent Cohen has extended this approach to the study of brain reorganization in the early blind (Abboud et al., Cerebral Cortex 2019), music reading (Bouhali et al., 2017 & 2020, Mongelli et al., 2017), color cognition (Siuda-Krzywicka et al., Cerebral Cortex 2021). Beyond this fundamental long-term work, Laurent Cohen has studied unusual and highly informative patients, sometimes opening up promising therapeutic pathways (see Cohen et al (2004) N Engl J Med; Cohen et al (in press) Arch Clin Transl Neurol; and the patents listed above).