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Martin Giurfa is January’s featured Faculty Member of the Month. His research focuses on invertebrate learning and memory, studying honeybees, as they can solve higher-order cognitive problems, like category or concept learning. Martin is using them as a model to identify neuronal and molecular mechanisms responsible for these complex behavioural feats.

Martin is Argentinean and obtained his PhD from the University of Buenos Aires in 1991. He carried out research at the Institute of Neurobiology at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, before moving to France in 2001, where he was appointed full professor of the University of Toulouse.

Since 2003, Martin is the founder and now deputy director of the Research Centre on Animal Cognition at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and he is an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences.

What triggered your interest in animal cognition?

Since I was a child, I have been what you would describe as an “animal lover”. I had a menagerie of animals, much to the dismay of my highly tolerant mother. I was particularly attracted by insects with their fascinating forms, colours and adaptations to all possible lifestyles.

I would spend hours watching them, observing their behaviour, and admiring the subtle mechanisms underlying their performances. At some point, admiration led to curiosity, “how does this work?”  My questions then snowballed: “to what extent are humans different?” and ” what can we learn about ourselves by studying animals?”

So, curiosity, fascination, and a willingness to understand, brought me to where I am today. When I was young I enjoyed a book called ‘The dancing bees: An account of life and sense of the honeybee’ written by Nobel Prize winner Karl von Frisch. I was fascinated by his elegant work uncovering the mechanisms of dance communication in bees, how he studied vision, olfaction, gustation and many other senses of the bees, with a scientific, experimental and rigorous approach.

It was thanks to von Frisch that I discovered the honeybee model, which I later chose for my own studies, and understood how I could study it.

You started the ‘Brain Awareness Week’ in the city of Toulouse in southern France. Can you tell us about the event and why you decided to organise it?

In 2001, I started organizing this event because I wanted to bring science, particularly neurosciences, to the public. It is important that people understand what we do as researchers, what the current questions are in neurosciences and how answering them can change their life, and how their taxes fund the research we do.

Explaining means not only educating but also getting informed and supportive society members. It is the best medicine against obscurantism and fundamentalism, which are trying to acquire new force in several levels of our societies.  Many years have passed since the first event and now a well-established committee organizes Brain Awareness Week in Toulouse.  It has become a scientific “must attend event” of the city, and I feel happy to have contributed to the birth of this initiative in my city.

Please tell us about one of your latest F1000Prime recommendation, why you picked it, and how it fits into the current research landscape?

My main motivation for picking the wonderful review ‘The emperor’s new wardrobe’ published in Science by Michael M. Yartsev was based on consideration of the number of papers and grants that are rejected based on the argument that they are useless or unpublishable because the research doesn’t use a standard transgenic model, such as the mouse or Drosophila.

This seems to be a common trend today. There are novel, fascinating techniques for visualizing neural activity, which are leading progress in understanding how the nervous system may work in certain cases and contexts. However, these are focused on a few modular species, such as mice and Drosophila.

However, I think only studying a few select species, e.g. transgenic mice, is a shortcoming. It restricts our biological perspective, meaning that our knowledge is based on the erroneous assumption that all species solve biological problems in the same way, ignoring the diversity of neural solutions implemented by evolution.

This review constitutes a wonderful plea against this deplorable trend. It analyses multiple negative consequences and highlights how exploring biological diversity can lead to fundamental discoveries in the field of neurosciences. It is a necessary read that will hopefully stimulate a change in attitude.

What piece of career advice would you like to pass on to early career researchers?

I hear more and more from students and early career researchers that the academic pathway is hard and long, and not suitable for having a family and financial security. Although I do not deny that there is truth in some of these statements, I would argue that fighting with the conviction that science is your passion, will always bring the light at the end of the tunnel.

Never lose curiosity and willingness to know, as they will give you the strength to fight. And with it, solutions to many of your problems.