Amaury François

Institut de Génomique Fonctionelle, CNRS

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Title

Central integration of social touch

Biosketch

Amaury François is a Research Fellow at the Montpellier Institute of Functional Genomics. Trained as an electrophysiologist and behaviorist, he quickly developed a passion for the study of the somatosensory system and the integration of tactile information.
After defending his thesis in 2013 on the excitability of neurons responsible for pain transmission in Montpellier, he spent 4 years working on top-down pain control and endogenous opioids at Stanford University in Gregory Scherrer's team.
The research team he has been leading since 2023 focuses on the role of touch in social behavior. His team has demonstrated the existence of sensory neurons innervating the skin, the C-LTMRs, responsible for pleasant touch. These same neurons, when artificially activated, reinforce social interactions in mice, and vice versa when inhibited. The team also demonstrated a link between C-LTMR activity and sensory phenotypes associated with autism spectrum disorder. Since then, his research team has focused on identifying how the information carried by these neurons converges with social information to influence animal behavior. He is particularly interested in the somato-sensory system and the integration of tactile information in cortical areas. He is seeking to identify the neural networks linking touch to emotions