Nikolas Karalis

Nikolas is a tenured researcher (chargé de recherche) at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and team leader at the Paris Brain Institute (Institut du Cerveau - ICM), where he leads the Neuronal Circuits & Brain Dynamics team, supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.

Nikolas studied Applied Mathematics and Physics at the National Technical University of Athens. 

He had always been fascinated by the complexity of the brain, so he decided to shift his focus to Neuroscience, and he joined the Neurasmus Master’s program in Neuroscience in Berlin and Bordeaux, where he worked with Cyril Herry on the neuronal circuits of fear behavior. 

During his Ph.D., he worked with Anton Sirota at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he investigated the role of breathing in entraining neuronal dynamics and engaged in the large-scale characterization of the oscillatory architecture of memory circuits. 

As an EMBO & MSCA postdoctoral fellow in the group of Andreas Lüthi at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel, and later as SNF Ambizione team leader at the FMI, he used a combination of modern neurotechnologies to unravel the role of neuromodulators in coordinating the activity of the amygdala during behavior.