Bassem Hassan is Team Leader and Inserm Research Director at The Paris Brain Institute (ICM) in Paris, France. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Biology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and my Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at The Ohio State University, U.S.A in 1996. Between 1996 and 2001 he was an HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and an NIH (National Institutes of Health) Postdoctoral Fellow at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas working on the transcriptional mechanisms of early neurogenesis in Drosophila and mouse. In 2001, moved to VIB (Flemish Institute of Biotechnology) and the University of Leuven Medical School in Belgium to establish the first Drosophila lab in the country. He worked at VIB and the University of Leuven as a Group Leader and Professor until the end of 2015. In 2016, he joined the Paris Brain Institute (PBI) to establish the laboratory of Brain Development, and was then appointed as the PBI’s Scientific Director, Director of Core Facilities and Deputy Executive Director between 2019 and 2024. In 2003, he received the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Young Investigator award and in 2009 he was elected EMBO member. In January 2016, He was named the Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Charité and the Freie Universität Berlin, in Berlin, Germany. In March 2016 he received the Allen Distinguished Investigator by the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group and was the 2019 laureate of the Roger De Spoelberch Prize f.

At the heart of our lab is a passion for discovery. We believe that understanding how the brain is wired—from the first cues in embryonic development to the emergence of individual behavioral traits—is key to unlocking treatments for neurological diseases. Our interdisciplinary approach combines genetics, computational biology, and live-cell imaging to tackle some of neuroscience’s most challenging questions. Research in our lab focuses on understanding the genetic mechanisms that regulate the early development of the nervous system from cell fate specification to neural circuit formation, using fruit fly, mouse and human iPS models. Our work deals with the role that transcriptional regulation and cell-cell signaling shape the identity and connectivity of neurons. Recent work from the lab has revealed unexpected insights into the regulation of time during early brain development, as well as the role of stochastic processes in brain wiring that challenge previously held assumptions about the emergence of specificity in neural circuit architecture.

The central question of the lab’s research is: how does the genome build the brain to be functional and resilient? A complex functional biological system is the emergent property of the self-organizing capacity of molecular networks. The most fundamental of these networks is the genome. The most sophisticated is the brain. The genomic network produces a set of instructions that builds the neuronal network to be functional over a lifetime and to be resilient and robust. We try to understand what that set of instructions is. Yet sometimes this network succumbs to disease and degeneration. Why? Our work tries to understand how developmental mechanisms lead to resilience and how defects in them predispose to degeneration. In total, our work has resulted in over 100 publications contributing important insights into these questions.