Rosa Cossart is the director of the Institute of Mediterranean Neurobiology (INMED), a reference institute in the field of systems neuroscience. She is also the founding director of Circuitphotonics, an experimental platform dedicated to the minimally invasive in vivo imaging of neuronal circuit dynamics in rodents and non-human primates.

The Cossart lab aims at gaining understanding of hippocampal function at circuit level in health and disease. Her team tries to outline the general principles by which hippocampal function, in the adult brain, is constrained by early developmental genetic programs and activity-dependent processes. To this end, they use and develop several approaches, in particular all optical interrogation of cortical circuits combined with electrophysiology, mouse genetics and cutting-edge data analysis, both in vivo and in vitro. Cossart and colleagues propose that rewinding the process of cortical development helps understanding the main organization principles of hippocampal cognitive maps and how they dysfunction in pathology.

Cossart has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how hippocampal function is supported by specific circuits in health and disease. Her lab discovered hub cells, GABAergic cells with an exceptional connectivity that can synchronize neurons during development. More recently, her team has identified the functional building blocks of hippocampal function in the form of stable assemblies that are bound together to encode spatio-temporal experience. Finally, they have uncovered a general rule for the organization of hippocampal circuits, rooted in their developmental origin, emphasizing the role of pioneer cells. In the field of pathology, her major contributions relate to the fate of GABA circuits in epilepsy. During her Ph.D., sge I showed, in vitro, that somatic and dendritic GABAergic circuits were differentially affected), and her lab imaged in vivo the critical contribution of inhibition to interictal spikes.