Petit Laurent
Career
Laurent Petit obtained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences in 1995 at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris (France). After a post-doctorate position at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda (USA), he joined the CNRS in 1998 where he is currently Research Director in the Groupe d’Imagerie Neurofonctionnelle, a team of the Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives (GIN-IMN, UMR5293, CNRS-CEA-Université de Bordeaux, France).
Until 2015, he was dedicated to studying the neural bases of spatial cognition in humans with functional MRI. He is notably the author of the first descriptions of the neural bases of eye movement control in healthy humans and their hemispheric specialization. Over the past decade, he has focused on neuroanatomy and developed innovative strategies for studying the white matter anatomy of the human brain with diffusion imaging and tractography. He is currently the coordinator of the CROSS-TRACTS project (ANR-22-CE45-0004), which aims to reveal the topology of white matter fiber crossings in the mouse brain.
He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed papers, including 40 devoted to diffusion MRI tractography in the last few years, half of which include ex vivo microscopic dissection data to validate the tractography data.
