This report is the sole result of the unit's evaluation by the expert committee, the composition of which is specified below. The assessments contained herein are the expression of an independent and collegial reviewing by the committee.

UNIT PRESENTATION

SCIENTIFIC DOMAIN

Originally dedicated to high-energy physics, LPTHE has gradually broadened its spectrum, in tune with the worldwide evolution of theoretical physics. High-energy physics (including particle physics and string theory) gathers roughly half of the activity of the LPTHE, the other half being distributed among various subjects, including integrable models, quantum field theory, mathematical physics, statistical and condensed matter physics.

UNIT WORKFORCE

GLOBAL ASSESSMENT OF THE UNIT

Based on the quality of its scientific output, international standing, and quality of intellectual life, the committee considers this to be an outstanding unit. The current director has played an essential role in developing and maintaining this exceptionally high quality.

The evaluation reports of Hceres are available online: www.hceres.com

Evaluation of clusters of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of research Evaluation of doctoral schools Evaluation of programmes Evaluation abroad

  the decree No.2014-1365 dated 14 November 2014, 1 The president of HCERES "countersigns the evaluation reports set up by the expert committees and signed by their chairman." (Article 8, paragraph 5); 2 The evaluation reports "are signed by the chairman of the expert committee". (Article 11, paragraph 2).

  LPTHE was created in 1966 by Maurice LÉVY. We have celebrated recently its 50 th birthday. The LPTHE is entirely located on the renovated Jussieu campus in the historical Latin Quarter, at walking distance from prestigious institutions such as École Normale Supérieure, Collège de France, Institut Poincaré.

	Unit name:		Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies
	Unit acronym: Requested label: MANAGEMENT TEAM		LPTHE UMR
	Application type: Mr Benoît DOUÇOT		Renewal
	Current number: HCERES NOMENCLATURE Head of the unit (2017-2018): ST Sciences and Technologies Project leader (2019-2023): ST2 Physics ST1 Mathematics	UMR 7589 Mr Benoît DOUÇOT Ms Michela PETRINI
	Number of teams or themes: 4
	COMMITTEE MEMBERS
	Chair:	Mr Stephen SHENKER, Stanford University, USA
	Experts:	Mr Aurélien BARRAU, CNRS, In2p3 (representative of CoNRS)
		Mr Sacha DAVIDSON, CNRS, In2p3
		Mr Malte HENKEL, université de Lorraine
		Mr Jean-Michel MAILLET, ENS Lyon
		Mr Pierre PUJOL, université Paul Sabatier Toulouse III (representative of CNU)
	HCERES scientific officer:
		Mr Yannis KARYOTAKIS
	Representatives of supervising institutions and bodies:
		Mr Bertrand MEYER, Sorbonne Université
		Mr Bart VAN TIGGELEN, CNRS

INTRODUCTION HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION OF THE UNIT

The

Unit workforce Number 30/06/2017 Number 01/01/2019 Permanent staff

	Full professors and similar positions	6	5
	Assistant professors and similar positions	3	3
	Full time research directors (Directeurs de recherche) and similar positions	9	9
	Full time research associates (Chargés de recherche) and similar positions	8	6
	Other scientists ("Conservateurs, cadres scientifiques des EPIC, fondations, industries, etc.")	0	0
	High school teachers	0	0
	Supporting personnel (ITAs, BIATSSs and others, notably of EPICs)	2	2
	TOTAL permanent staff	28	25
	Non-permanent staff
	Non-permanent professors and associate professors, including emeritus	2
	Non-permanent full time scientists, including emeritus, post-docs	14
	Non-permanent supporting personnel	0
	PhD Students	13

TOTAL non-permanent staff 29 TOTAL unit 57


President Michel Cosnard

Chairman Gilles Thuret

This report is the sole result of the CIC's evaluation by the expert committee, the composition of which is specified below. The assessments contained herein are the expression of an independent and collegial reviewing by the committee. The CIC is located in the "15-20" buildings, for the most part on 3 levels: clinical retina, retinal imaging, glaucoma and surface (clinical and imaging). The AF Foundation's CR department is always associated with it.

CIC PRESENTATION

The links to the IdV, which is just a few steps away, are close.

It also includes 2 platforms located at the IdV, of virtual reality adapted to visual pathologies unique in France, street lab and homelab, (two systems using virtual reality for visual deficiency) that complete the whole.

MANAGEMENT MODULE

The CIC-OPH is directed since its creation by Mr José Alain SAHEL.

HCERES NOMENCLATURE

SVE6 Santé Publique, Épidémiologie, Recherche Clinique.

SCIENTIFIC DOMAIN

All areas of ophthalmology (excluding cancer) are represented, with a preponderance of retinal diseases (degenerative, dystrophic, vascular) due to the CIC history and the large cohorts of patients with rare retinal pathologies ("genetic dystrophies") but also frequent (AMD, CRVO, uveitis

GLOBAL ASSESSMENT OF THE CIC

The CIC-OPH offers a complete ophthalmologic clinical investigation platform.

Several entry modes are possible: The CIC is able to build a clinical trial from A to Z (from design to finalization) carrying out the translation of an academic innovation of 15-20 or IdV but is also offering industrial services.

This flexibility is clearly a strength.

The ability to attract major ophthalmology companies in the field is an undeniable strength and guarantees significant financing.

Its activities are based on highly experienced teams with leaders having each a dominant position in their subspecialty.

There is a major ability of the CIC team to get or be associated with Inserm research units focused on the field of OPH to regularly obtain very high levels of public funding (PHRC, RHU, ANR, ANR industrial chair, ERC,…).

International collaborations are numerous and in very innovative technological fields (retinal prosthesis, gene therapy (USA), ocular surface/Glaucoma (Beijin) for instance), which positions CIC-OPH at the top of the international competition.

The evaluation reports of Hceres are available online: www.hceres.com

Evaluation of clusters of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of research Evaluation of doctoral schools Evaluation of programmes International evaluation and accreditation

INTRODUCTION

  HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION OF THE CICThe CIC-OPH is the only CIC solely dedicated to ophthalmology. Created in 2004 with the desire to link very logically to the Centre Hopsitalier National d'Ophtalmologie ( CHNO ) des 15-20 and the Institut de la Vision (IdV) with a dedicated Clinical Research platform (CRPt)from now on) to implement translational research based on IdV discoveries, attract industrialists, and focused cohorts of patients. The Adolph de Rotschild Foundation's (ARF) Clinical Research (CR) department, with a more paediatric, neuro-ophthalmological and low vision rehabilitation orientation, is historically also associated with the CIC. The CIC was renewed in 2008 and evaluated A+ by AERES in 2013.


President Michel Cosnard

Chairwoman Anne Siegel

This report is the sole result of the unit's evaluation by the expert committee, the composition of which is specified below. The assessments contained herein are the expression of an independent and collegial reviewing by the committee. The partnership is located on four sites: Institut Curie Saint-Cloud site hosts one team, Institut Curie Paris site hosts two teams, the platform (core facility) and half of the CBIO team. The other half of the CBIO team is hosted on Mines Paris Tech site. The last team is hosted in a building rented by Institut Curie, within walking distance of the two latter sites.

UNIT PRESENTATION

MANAGEMENT TEAM

The partnership is composed of two components. The U900 part involves a partnership between IC and Inserm and is leaded by Mr Emmanuel BARILLOT. The CBIO component involves Mines ParisTech and is headed by Mr Jean-Philippe VERT.

Hcéres NOMENCLATURE SVE6_2; SVE2_2; SVE6_1.

SCIENTIFIC DOMAIN

The main scientific domains of the unit are computational and systems biology applied to molecular and cellular cancer research. To achieve the goal of analyzing large-scale cancer datasets, the unit develops methodological researches in:

-epidemiology (team 1, led by N. ANDRIEU), -computational systems biology of cancer (team 2, led by E. BARILLOT), -machine learning and high dimensional data analysis (team 3, led by J.-P. VERT), -biostatistics (team 4, led by A. LATOUCHE since 2016).

In addition, the unit hosts a bioinformatics platform (gathering one third of the unit staff). The activities of the platform are mainly focused on the analysis and treatment of data produced by other units of IC. A short part of its activity is related to supporting research activities of the unit. The activities of the platform were not part of the evaluation.

UNIT WORKFORCE

GLOBAL ASSESSMENT OF THE UNIT

The unit has had outstanding scientific results, widely disseminated via publications, presentations, and release of free software and packages implementing the achievements made. A noticeable feature of the unit is its capability to cover a complete scientific spectrum, from very theoretical results in computer sciences and mathematics to applied results in data analysis and molecular biology. The unit had an outstanding number of grants in cancer computational biology at national and European level, involving a wide network of international collaborators. In terms of scientific policy, the unit has recruited a new very promising PI in clinical biostatistics to balance the leave of a former PI in this domain. Locally, the unit is excellently integrated within the research ecosystem.

The committee noticed that interactions between the teams' unit are not favored by the four different locations of the unit. Some of the teams are understaffed and could benefit for more stable research positions. Both the number of PhDs and the outputs of the PhD students are very heterogeneous within the teams and could be globally increased. The bioinformatics platform represents an important part of the unit staff and activity and has a major role in terms of dissemination. The unit would strongly benefit of making explicit and clear the different activities of the platform, from internal support to the unit's research teams (software development, data analysis) to external support to IC teams and national programs (bioanalysis).

The evaluation reports of Hceres are available online : www.hceres.com

Evaluation of clusters of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of research Evaluation of doctoral schools Evaluation of programmes International evaluation and accreditation

INTRODUCTION

  HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION OF THE UNIT U900-CBIO was created in 2008, as an extension of a bioinformatics platform that has been founded in 2003 by Institut Curie (IC). The structure is made of two components: an Institut Curie/Inserm unit (U900) and a Mines ParisTech Center (CBIO). The first component (Inserm U900) comprises three research teams and a bioinformatics platform (core facility). The second component (CBIO) is composed of a single team. A consortium agreement was negotiated between IC, Inserm and Mines ParisTech to clarify the partnership. The two components are independent as far as administration and finances are concerned. During daily activities, the CBIO component is considered as an equivalent team to the others.

Representatives of supervising institutions and bodies:

Ms Geneviève ALMOUZNI, Institut Curie Ms Camille CHAUDONNERET, Inserm Ms Catherine NGUYEN, Inserm Mr Yannick VIMONT, École des Mines


President Michel Cosnard

Chairman Philippe Pasero

This report is the sole result of the unit's evaluation by the expert committee, the composition of which is specified below. The assessments contained herein are the expression of an independent and collegial reviewing by the committee.

UNIT PRESENTATION

MANAGEMENT TEAM

The UMR 3244 is currently headed by Mr Arturo LONDOÑO-VALLEJO. Mr Antonin MORILLON, the project leader, served as deputy director during the review period.

HCERES NOMENCLATURE

SVE2_2

SCIENTIFIC DOMAIN

The UMR 3244 investigates the molecular mechanisms that maintain the integrity of the genome and the epigenome, as well as the consequences of deregulations of these mechanisms on cancer development. More specifically, research topics concern DNA replication, non-coding RNAs, p53 biology, telomere stability and meiotic recombination, with a specific emphasis on genomic-based assays and bioinformatics.

UNIT WORKFORCE

GLOBAL ASSESSMENT OF THE UNIT

The UMR3244 investigates the mechanisms that maintain the integrity of the genome and epigenome and how perturbations of these processes contribute to cancer and age-related human diseases, in line with the scientific objectives of the research center of Institut Curie. This relatively small unit -six research teams-has an excellent international reputation and a very good scientific production. They are strongly involved in teaching and have trained 18 PhD students during the period under evaluation. The unit is well funded, with many national and international grants, including an ERC grant and two ATIP-Avenir starting grants. At the end of the previous contract, the unit was facing a major threat with the planned retirement of two of its influential team leaders. This has been well compensated by the recruitment of an excellent senior and two junior teams, which demonstrates the attractiveness of the unit. Importantly, the expertise in bioinformatics of two of the new PIs will significantly reinforce the potential of the unit in bioinformatics and bioanalysis studies, which will be instrumental to the success of the five-year project of the unit. This project builds on current research program and will incorporate state of the art approaches to take into account the heterogeneity of cell populations and genetic/epigenetic instability at the level of individual cells. The feasibility of this research program is excellent considering the expertise and past achievements of the teams.

The evaluation reports of Hceres are available online : www.hceres.com

Evaluation of clusters of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of research Evaluation of doctoral schools Evaluation of programmes International evaluation and accreditation

INTRODUCTION

  HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION OF THE UNITThe UMR 3244 is one of the 12 mixed research units of the research center of Institut Curie, led by Ms Geneviève ALMOUZNI since 2013. This research center brings together 1100 people organized in 86 teams distributed between the Paris and Orsay sites. The research center hosts also a translational research unit connected to the hospital group, a training unit and technological platforms organized in a structure called CurieCoreTech. The research center is organized in four scientific domains to foster interactions between research units. The UMR3244 is part of domain 2 -Development, Cancer, Genetics and Epigenetics-based on the Paris site and led by Ms Edith HEARD. This domain is supported by the Labex DEEP (Développement, Épigenèse, Épigénétique et Potentiel), which associates two departments of the Curie Institute : Dynamique Nucléaire et Plasticité du Génome and Génétique et Biologie du Développement. The UMR3244 is the continuation of the laboratory headed by Mr Bernard DUTRILLAUX, who retired in 2002. It was created in 2005 after a period of restructuration and was led until 2013 by Ms Michèle DEBATISSE. The unit is located on two different floors of the Trouillet-Rossignol Pavilion.

HCERES scientific officer: Ms Urszula HIBNER Representatives of supervising institutions and bodies:

	Unit name:	Dynamics of Genetic Information: fundamental bases and cancer
	Unit acronym:	DIG-Cancer
	Requested label:	UMR
	Application type:	Renewal
	Current number:	UMR 3244
	Head of the unit (2014-2018):	Mr Arturo LONDOÑO-VALLEJO
	Project leader (2019-2023):	Mr Antonin MORILLON
	Number of teams:	4
	COMMITTEE MEMBERS
	Chair:	Mr Philippe PASERO, IGH Montpellier
	Experts:	Mr Pascal BARBRY, IPMC Nice
		Ms Christelle DANTEC, CRBM Montpellier (supporting personnel)
		Ms Giuseppina GIGLIA, INMG Lyon (representative of CoNRS)
		Ms Marie-Josèphe GIRAUD-PANIS, IRCAN Nice
		Ms Eva HOFFMANN, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
		Ms Varda ROTTER, Weizmann Institute, Israel
		Ms Joëlle SOBCZAK, UPMC Paris (representative of CNU)
		Ms Geneviève ALMOUZNI, Institut Curie
		Mr Frédéric BOCCARD, CNRS
		Mr Bertrand MEYER, Université Pierre et Marie Curie
		Mr Stéphane MAZEVET, Université de recherche Paris Sciences et Lettres


Meunier

Grading

Once the visits for the 2012-2013 evaluation campaign had been completed, the chairpersons of the expert committees, who met per disciplinary group, proceeded to attribute a score to the research units in their group (and, when necessary, for these units' in-house teams). This score (A+, A, B, C) concerned each of the six criteria defined by the AERES. NN (not-scored) attached to a criteria indicate that this one was not applicable to the particular case of this research unit or this team. Criterion 1 -C1 : Scientific outputs and quality ; Criterion 2 -C2 : Academic reputation and appeal ; Criterion 3 -C3 : Interactions with the social, economic and cultural environment ; Criterion 4 -C4 : Organisation and life of the institution (or of the team) ; Criterion 5 -C5 : Involvement in training through research ; Criterion 6 -C6 : Strategy and five-year plan.

With respect to this score, the research unit concerned by this report and, its in-house teams

 Introduction History and geographical location of the unit

The laboratory entitled Center for Neurophysics, Physiology, Pathology emerges from the fusion of four teams previously hosted by two different laboratories i.e. the "Laboratoire de Neurophysique et Physiologie" and the "Centre d'études sensorimotricité". It is located in the Saint-Pères research and teaching building. Altogether, the four teams gather 21 researchers (13 full-time and 6 with teaching duty) and 4 ITA/IATOS. As such, the laboratory is one, even if not the only one, example of a genuine center of interdisciplinary research, since it gathers in equal number theoreticians and experimentalists from both the Institut des Sciences Biologiques (INSB) and the Institut de Physique (INP) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), but there will be a majority of experimentalists in the new laboratory. Another feature of the Center for Neurophysics, Physiology, Pathology is the wide palette of experimental techniques since true technical and experimental expertise ranges from molecular analysis on animal models to human behavioural analysis going through in vivo and in vitro electrophysiology, and indeed theoretical approaches.

The laboratory is part of the Institute of Neurosciences and Cognition that gathers various laboratories from the University Paris Descartes, encompassing a large community of researchers in the various domains of Brain Sciences.

Management team:

Mr Claude MEUNIER, DR at CNRS, will head the new research unit.

AERES nomenclature:

SVE1_LS5 Neurobiology Unit workforce: The most important strength of the laboratory is the overall high level of publications across the teams together with very good international visibility. There is no significant weaknesses in any team. Real translational approaches have been developed in the lab.

One peculiarity and strength is the complete integration of theoreticians and experimentalists that conceive and conduct research at the same place. As a rare example, the spectrum from molecular biology to the most integrated and theoretical aspects are covered within the laboratory. This is a key reason for the attractiveness of the laboratory.

Weaknesses and threats:

Two weaknesses have been raised. First of all, the very low institutional technical support. Due to the very wide span of technical expertise, development of the laboratory will be impeded by the lack of adequate support. Secondly, the present lack of clarity about the governance of the new unit should be also addressed as a priority

Recommendations:

Improving the ratio of technical support should be a priority.

In light of the restructuring and growth of the unit, the new challenge will be to set a well defined governance structure that will gather a general consensus.

 Detailed assessments

Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

A detailed analysis of scientific quality and output is analytically performed in each team report. Overall, the scientific quality in terms of academic publications is excellent since, among much more, they published 23 papers in the leading Journal of Neuroscience, 1 Science, 2 Physical Letters. The total number of international peer-review publications is > 130. Laboratory members organized several international meetings and schools or workshops.

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

The laboratory is very attractive since 6 young researchers have been recruited in the last years on permanent positions. Post-docs, and more surprisingly students, are joining the laboratory from various countries (Argentina, Japan, USA, Europe…). Although challenging, significant funds have been successfully obtained and several international conferences/ workshops and international meeting have been organized by laboratory members.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment One member of the laboratory has clinical responsibilities (in team 3) and the laboratory configuration will promote other teams to be involved in translational projects. Members are also involved in general public dissemination.

Assessment of the unit's organisation and life

Several aspects of the organization still need to be set up. The committee clearly understood that priority had been given to scientific organization since the centre is a new amalgamation that brings together investigators with different scientific and laboratory cultures. While the committee has been impressed by the high level of scientific quality, it had very little, if any, information on the future laboratory governance as well as on various issues such as hygiene and security. The committee strongly encourages the director to organize, following the evaluation, general meetings in which every one can participate in defining new rules.

Assessment of the unit's involvement in training through research

Overall, training is very good to excellent, specifically attributable to the investment of one PI. The graduate students and postdoctoral fellows claim that they have a supportive and collegial environment and are fully integrated to the neuroscience community at the University Paris Descartes.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The committee has been highly convinced by the two-axes strategy that allows for a real merger between the two founder laboratories. Furthermore, it is planned to have a general scientific policy that would grant the teams through these axes.

4  Team-by-team analysis Over the past several years, this lab has engaged in high risk activities which have paid off. First, they developed the technique of in vivo dynamic clamp of spinal motoneurons in the cat, then adapted their in vivo techniques to develop an in vivo mouse preparation for recording spinal neurons, and thirdly successfully developed the mouse preparation for in vivo motor unit typing. They are the only lab in the world that is able to do this, which has provided them the opportunity to study the physiological and pathophysiological properties of type-identified motoneurons. These preparations have set the stage for future work, and will facilitate the exploration of important questions in the coming years (see below).

A young new researcher has introduced these techniques to the laboratory in the deparment of Physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he did his post-doctoral fellowship. The team is strengthened by his recent recruitment back to their centre, where he will complement the other team members.

The team has published 16 papers in the last 5 years (including those by the junior investigator when at Northwestern), 8 of which are in the high-ranking Journal of Neuroscience. Three of their papers have already been cited more than 20 times each, and total citations are 102 (data from Web of Science), which considering that 10 of the publications were in 2011 or 2012 is impressive. Their conference presentations are international. One to two of these are review papers. This productivity amounts to about 1 research paper per person per year.

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

The work done by this team has influenced the work in many labs around the world. It has also led to success in obtaining grants. Importantly, the team holds an NIH R01 award together with a laboratory at Northwestern. This would be an excellent accomplishment at any time; in the current fiscal situation in the USA with funding rates very low, this is truly outstanding. They have collaborations with Northwestern as well as with others in Rome, Paris, and Marseille. They have organized an international meeting in Paris (2010) that was very well attended.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment

After taking risks to develop these preparations (see above), these successful preparations will allow them to explore the pathophysiology of a devastating disease, ALS. So although they have not yet collaborated with clinicians, their grouping with the expertise of the development and pathologies of neuromuscular junctions team -which has clinical collaborators -is promising.

Assessment of the unit's organisation and life

Nothing specific to mention for this criteria

Assessment of the unit's involvement in training through research

There are a number of undergraduate and graduate students that have been trained by this team. Evidence of their integration includes their involvement as authors on publications. In addition, some trainees have gone on to have successful academic careers.

The group leader and colleagues are involved in formal teaching. The group leader teaches at the Masters level (at Descartes and UPMC), and represents Descartes on the board of the ED3C PhD program. He is also involved in PhD and masters candidate juries. A member of team teaches at the Spring School of the ENP, and another one, although newly appointed, has also begun to teach BIP Masters.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The strategy of the team is based on the novel preparations that they have developed and the findings they have obtained from the use of these preparations. The strategy represents a logical extension from this work. They have divided the research into 3 projects: 1) to profile sub-types of motoneurons; 2) to characterize a central synapse (motoneuron to Renshaw cell), and to study motoneuron degeneration in ALS. They have the tools and expertise to carry out these experiments. That is, their investment in high risk activity in the past is now paying off and they are assured of obtaining high quality and meaningful data. This is an excellent project that will certainly impact the field of spinal physiology as well as the pathophysiology of ALS. The preparations are difficult and unique, making the program ambitious and innovative. The strategy is clearly delineated. The team will maintain its international standing through this high quality research.

The strategy of alignment with team 4 is very powerful. Specifically, as ALS affects (and may start at) the neuromuscular junction, their combined expertise could lead to further understanding of this disease. In addition, there is potential for translation with the links that team 4 has established with clinicians.

Conclusion

 Strengths and opportunities: This is a very strong group of researchers who have a track record of producing high quality results. The opportunity for collaboration with the the development and pathologies of neuromuscular junctions team and possibly in the future with clinicians is a tremendous opportunity.

 Weaknesses and threats:

Despite their success at obtaining external peer-reviewed grant funding, the team is lacking in stable technical support. Given the difficulty of their experiments, improvement in this situation would significantly benefit the team and hence the field.

The lack of space in the current animal house is preventing some series of experiments. The team has a limited number of cages that they are managing well, but the acquisition of new transgenic strains is difficult to impossible. Hopefully, the new animal facility will be ready in the not too distant future.

 Recommendations:

The team should continue their strong work, and build supports with the other teams in the lab through journal clubs and group/lab meetings. This may lead to new and interesting collaborations. The publication activity is excellent as quantified by 32 publications published during 2007-2012, of which 24 publications appeared when the members were actually working in the unit. The remaining publications appeared prior to the members' arrival in the unit. It is notable that a large percentage of the publications appeared in highranking journals such as Journal of Neuroscience ( 7), Physical Review Letters (2) and Science (1). Especially theoretical papers are notoriously difficult to publish in high-ranking general neuroscience journals; hence the accomplishments of the team are laudable. Statistically the scientific output quantifies to 0.98 articles per year per researcher (counting 6.5 full-time researchers), which in itself is not necessarily high. However, the committee of experts appreciated the scientific strategy of the team to strive for quality rather than quantity.

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

The team is internationally well recognized as one of the leading groups in theoretical neuroscience in Europe. Various indicators support the superb academic reputation of the team and are discussed in the following.

Team members are regularly invited to national and international conferences, as well as workshops and graduate schools, and assistance in international peer evaluation committees. They have organized various international conferences and workshops. The team takes a leadership role in the France-Israel LEA for Neuroscience, which further enhances the international attractiveness of the team due to frequent academic exchanges outside the laboratory. Quite a substantial number of national and international collaborations is in place and has proven functional documented by mutual publications. The team has clearly demonstrated to be able to attract funding from national and international sources, which helps them to finance their research and international activities. Further, a significant percentage of students and postdocs is international, further underwriting the team's international reputation.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment Outside of the academic context, no main interactions have been noted except of the affiliation of a member as vice president of CAPET Biotechnologies.

Assessment of the unit's organisation and life

Nothing specific to mention for this criteria

Assessment of the unit's involvement in training through research

Several of the team members are regularly invited to teach at pedagogical sessions of international workshops and graduate schools.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The novel composition of the team of theoreticians and experimentalists promises to provide an exciting and fruitful environment. So far only little interactions of two subgroups are evidenced through mutual publications, but clear plans in terms of regular and frequent seminars and common subprojects have been put in place to nurture these interactions. Each subgroup has interesting projects that are doable given the resources. The evaluation committee appreciates the multi-tiered approach in continuing existing research lines that promise to be successful since they are based on prior results; as well as addressing novel scientific problems arising from the novel team composition. Notably, a member of the team brings a new exciting scientific field to the team and has built a new experimental set-up to perform studies on behavior and electrophysiology with birds (including brain lesions) in parallel to computational neuroscience.

Conclusion  Strengths and opportunities:

The novel team has well-developed projects that promise interesting results within a four year framework. Notable is the well-formulated scientific vision of the theoretical component. The interdisicplinary composition is a wonderful opportunity to physiologically ground the theoretical work. A potential enhanced computational support by the institution, preferably by the acquisition of a High Performance Computer (HPC) cluster and its technical support, provides an excellent opportunity to improve the already superb performance of this team.

 Weaknesses and threats:

No weakness or threat was clearly identified.

 Recommendations:

The novel configuration of the team is very exciting. The committee encourages the team to pursue its wellproven and established scientific strategy, however, prioritize the interactions between theoreticians and experimentalists within the new team whenever possible.  Detailed assessments

Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

The research developed by this new team essentially concerns the integration of multisensory cues in the control of movement and perception. The team members are experts in a wide range of vestibular system's functions, and a special interest is therefore devoted to the vestibular inputs. Another important aim consists in determining how sensorimotor processes adapt to perturbations such as change in the gravito-inertial force field, pathologies and sensory conflicts. The use of both human (healthy, idiopathic scoliosis) and animal (rodent, frog, pigeon) studies and the use of numerous different innovative and complementary approaches (e.g. body and eye movement recordings, virtual reality, tracking of intracellular calcium ions concentration, modelling, labyrinth ablation of frog Xenopus at larval stage, …) allow them to undertake a focused attack on these issues.

A strength of the members of this team concerns technical developments. They have been involved in numerous technical research innovations (e.g., system for recording movements of rodents with respect to their underlying skeletons, electro-optical technique for controlling calcium concentration in real time at submicron resolution...) and are currently working on robots movement control.

The team is very productive. Since 2007, 66 original papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Many of them were published in very competitive international journals (e.g., Journal of Neuroscience (N=8), Journal of Neurophysiology (N=8), Journal of Physiology Lond). The fact that the team is similarly successful to publish animal and human studies in such journals is remarkable. Several papers were also published in important clinical journals (e.g., Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Archives of Otolaryngology --Head and Neck Surgery, Clinical and Experimental Allergy). The originality and importance of the work developed by his team are attested by the high number of citations of several papers (e.g., at least 7 papers have an average citation per year greater than 4.45).

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

The team has established a large and stable network of local, national (Lyon, Marseille, Strasbourg) and international (Germany, Italy, US, Belgium) partners. They lead collaborations financed by grants (e.g., CNRS (PEPS and Neuro IC programs), CNES, ESA and ANR that involve national and international contributors. They are referees for many of these funding agencies.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment

This is another strength of the members of the team. Indeed, several researchers conducted by the team may have important impacts in clinics, space navigation, robotics, virtual reality. Numerous non-academic partners use their expertise and this takes the form of contracts between the team and these external partners (Fondation Cotrel, Pierre Fabre Médicaments, CNES, ESA). The members have a strong a sustained interest in dissemination, and have contributed to the TV program "Une Nuit dans l'Espace" (France 2, French TV).

Assessment of the unit's organisation and life

Nothing specific to mention for this criteria

Assessment of the unit's involvement in training through research

Team members have supervised the research internships of several Masters (1 and 2) students. 2008 was the last year that a student has obtained a PhD degree under the direction of a team member. Currently, the team does not have any enrolled PhD student. The HDR recently obtained by a team member will probably help to increase the involvement of the team in research training.

Fulltime researchers have contributed to teaching in local Masters programs and as lecturers in international summer schools (e.g. Champalimaud Neuroscience Program, Portugal).

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The proposed project is original and important for the advance of knowledge in the field of sensorimotor integration. It is in direct continuity with the work developed in recent years by the members in their originating teams. Thanks to the integration within a single team of researchers having different strengths (electrophysiology, clinics, computation, behavior, etc.), multi-disciplinarity will be pushed further in the project of this new research coalition.

The proposed project is ambitious but it appears feasible due to the excellence of the team and its members. Most of the techniques that will be employed are mastered by them. External researchers to the team will provide additional assistance when required (e.g. fMRI). Globally, this research strategy holds great promise and its feasibility appears also assured by the funding that is already available.

Conclusion

 Strengths and opportunities:

The strength of the team clearly lies in the unique combination of competences, combining methodological and content-related expertise. The integration of this team within the same research axis of the team "Cerebral, Dynamics, Plasticity, Learning" who has great expertise in computational neuroscience is promising.

 Weaknesses and threats:

Although the project will still be feasible without them, it will certainly take a longer time to be accomplished without the recruitment of the two multi-talented postdocs who are currently in the team but who are at a pivotal time in their careers.

 Recommendations:

The members of this team are encouraged to maintain the high quality of their scientific productions. They are highly encouraged to create, as they planned to do, the new and promising collaborations between members of the team who have never worked together before.  Detailed assessments

Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

The team generated 16 publications in 5 years (i.e. 1.07 publications per year per ETP), which is considered a good output in this scientific field. Several of these publications were published in high impact factor journals: like J. of Neuroscience and Development indicating the level of scientific quality as well as the level of attractiveness of their research. The team has in particular identified two new ligands of the MuSK/LRP4 complexe and their sequential role in the neuromuscular junction synaptogenetic process. Their recent discovery of the role of the doublecortin in such process is also of great importance for the field.

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

There are several indicators that support the good academic reputation and appeal of this team. First of all, the group leader has been invited for several international seminars and her expertise has been requested by several international research councils. Second, the team recruited one CR2 INSERM researcher and one CR1 CNRS researcher joined the team in the last 3 years. And finally, the amount of financial support over the last years also indicates that this team has an excellent reputation.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment

This interaction is clearly expressed by the clinical relevance of this unit's research. The team received several AFM grants and AFM fellowships. Furthermore, the group leader expertise was also used by the AFM council, showing a bidirectional involvement.

Assessment of the unit's organisation and life

Nothing specific to mention for this criteria

Assessment of the unit's involvement in training through research

The involvement of this team in teaching research to students is very big. In short: lecturing student's for 128 hours per year, management of the Master programme (Co-Head) and within this programme managing the Neurobiology programme (Head), management of the PhD programme (Head), training international students at the level of master or PhD and participating in many PhD committees.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The current five-year plan is a logical continuation of this team's research of the last years. The solid foundation that they created with their research together with the current plan will undoubtedly results in more insight in the factors that are involved in the development of the NMJ. Additionally, the extension of their future research on NMJ pathologies and their collaboration with clinicians will be important for the translation of fundamental NMJ research to clinical applications and will (ultimately) be beneficial for society. This team recruited 2 new researchers and the team grew from 4 to 6 members. Therefore this team can cover a larger research area and can generate a larger scientific output in the coming 5 years.

Conclusion  Strengths and opportunities:

This team is deeply involved in the education and training of master and PhD students on many levels. Due to this involvement, this team has insight in the quality of Paris Descartes students which is important for the selection and recruitment of new excellent young scientists. This is not only important for this team themselves, but also for the entire unit.

Their collaboration with spinal physiology team is an interesting and logical choice, because together their research will cover the entire lifecycle of motor neurons in sickness and health. The committee believes that this collaboration can be very fruitful.

With the enhanced clinical relevance in the new 5 year research plan, the team steps into the 'wellappreciated' field of translation research.

 Weaknesses and threats:

The vitality and commitment of this team to science, education, and health-care is to be commended. The team has a high teaching load and teaching responsibilities (without secretarial support). Therefore, it is important to recognize that the impact of some of these projects may be limited by the inability of these researchers to spend as much time doing research as other scientists without significant teaching. Despite their high teaching load and teaching responsibilities, they maintain a very good standard of publication.

 Recommendations:

The committee encourages the team to continue their translational research and prioritize whenever possible the collaboration with a team having expertise in spinal physiology. In fact the current team can strongly benefit from the electrophysiological know-how of spinal physiology team, whereas such team can strongly benefit from the molecular expertise of the current team.

Histogram

Comments on the report

We are all thankful to the visiting committee for their thorough and in depth evaluation of our project, and we are very glad of their praise on our accomplishments and our scientific plans. In this context, I have little comments to make as project leader.

The committee well noticed that the lack of technical support was our main problem, both within teams and at the scale of the whole unit. This point was emphasized in my presentation of the project. Thanks to the evaluation process, our institutions have become fully aware of our dramatic situation in this respect and are now taking steps to improve it. Our part time CNRS secretary will work full--time for the new unit, and both CNRS and Paris Descartes are committed to give us an appropriate technical support. I am very grateful for their efforts in a difficult economic context. However, we still lack technical support for the moment, not only in Team 1 but also in Teams 2 and 3, in part because of the Sauvadet law, which limits the duration of temporary contracts, and of changes of rules for recruitments on ANR grants.

As stated in the report, a higher priority was put till now on the scientific project than on the management of the new unit. Giving a scientific identity with clear research topics to the new unit was the basis for a sound project. Our next priority, for 2013, is to formalize a new management model for the unit, innovative and taking into account the past experience of the LNP and CESeM teams, to nominate a Vice--Director and to write down the clear rules (laboratory board, budget, common investments, hygiene and safety issues…) that will underlie our collective life. I fully understand the recommendations committee on this point, and I am confident that this will prove rather easy. The four teams have already interacted both within their former units, LNP and CESeM, and in the framework of the Institute of Neuroscience and Cognition, which provides a healthy scientific and social background for the new unit. Let me also recall that my management style allowed to lead successfully the LNP since 2010 while creating and extending the INC with the help and support of two CESeM team leaders involved in the unit.

The animal housing problems mentioned in the report affect not only Team 1 but the whole unit. Researchers in Teams 2 and 3 also lack room for their strains of mice, and a new aviary and A2 facility for viruses is needed by Team 2. Hopefully, all these problems will be solved in a near future thanks to the joint efforts of IFR95, the Biomedical Faculty, CNRS and Paris Descartes University for installing a new animal house. The installation of a High Performance Computing Cluster, with a dedicated technical support, is evoked in the report, and some informal discussions are indeed starting on this issue. If the Biomedical Faculty or Paris Descartes University actually made that move, this would be extremely beneficial for Team 2 (and to a lesser extent Team 3) that is at the forefront of Computational Neuroscience and has important needs in large scale numerical simulations.

4N6

   Team-by-team analysis Team 2: Cerebral Dynamics, Plasticity, Learning Name of team leader: Mr David HANSEL & Ms Carole LEVENES Workforce Other permanent staff (without research duties) N4: Other professors (PREM, ECC, etc.) N5: Other EPST or EPIC researchers (DREM, Postdoctoral students, visitors, etc.) 1 spent at least 12 months in the unit 1 Number of Research Supervisor Qualifications (HDR) taken 1 2 Qualified research supervisors (with an HDR) or similar positions 2  Detailed assessments Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

  Other permanent staff (without research duties) N4: Other professors (PREM, ECC, etc.) N5: Other EPST or EPIC researchers (DREM, Postdoctoral students, visitors

Team workforce Number as at 30/06/2012 Number as at 01/01/2014

				2014-2018
				Number of
				project producers
	N1: Permanent professors and similar positions	2	5	5
	N2: Permanent EPST or EPIC researchers and similar positions	12	13	13
	N3: Other permanent staff (without research duties)	3,2	5
	N4: Other professors (PREM, ECC, etc.)	2	2	2
	N5: Other EPST or EPIC researchers (DREM, Postdoctoral students, visitors, etc.)	3	3	3
	N6: Other contractual staff (without research duties)	2
	TOTAL N1 to N6	24,2	28	23
	Taux de produisants		100,00 %

Unit workforce Number as at 30/06/2012 Number as at 01/01/2014

	Doctoral students	10	10
	Theses defended	2	5
	Postdoctoral students having spent at least 12 months in the unit*	4	3
	Number of Research Supervisor Qualifications (HDR) taken	1	8
	Qualified research supervisors (with an HDR) or similar positions	8	16
	2  Assessment of the unit
	Strengths and opportunities:

Team 1: Spinal Physiology & Pathophysiology Name of team leader: Mr Daniel ZYTNICKI Workforce Team workforce Number as at 30/06/2012 Number as at 01/01/2014 2014-2018 Number of project producers N1: Permanent professors and similar positions

	 Detailed assessments
	Assessment of scientific quality and outputs
	N2: Permanent EPST or EPIC researchers and similar positions	2.5	3	3
	N3: Other permanent staff (without research duties)
	N4: Other professors (PREM, ECC, etc.)
	N5: Other EPST or EPIC researchers (DREM, Postdoctoral students, visitors, etc.)	1	1	1
	N6: Other contractual staff (without research duties)	1	1
	TOTAL N1 to N6	4.5	5	4
	Team workforce	Number as at 30/06/2012	Number as at 01/01/2014
	Doctoral students	2	2
	Theses defended	0	1
	Postdoctoral students having spent at least 12 months in the unit	1	1
	Number of Research Supervisor Qualifications (HDR) taken	0	1
	Qualified research supervisors (with an HDR) or similar positions	2	2

6 

 6 Statistics by field: SVE on 10/06/2013

	Grades
	Critères	C1 Qualité scientifique et production	C2 Rayonnement et attractivité académiques	C3 Relations avec l'environnement social, économique et culturel	C4 Organisation et vie de l'entité	C5 Implication dans la formation par la recherche	C6 Stratégie et projet à cinq ans
	A+	67	62	52	73	65	60
	A	57	67	71	45	65	63
	B	12	7	4	7	6	14
	C	0	0	0	3	0	1
	Non Noté	3	3	12	11	3	1
	Percentages
	Critères	C1 Qualité scientifique et production	C2 Rayonnement et attractivité académiques	C3 Relations avec l'environnement social, économique et culturel	C4 Organisation et vie de l'entité	C5 Implication dans la formation par la recherche	C6 Stratégie et projet à cinq ans
	A+	48%	45%	37%	53%	47%	43%
	A	41%	48%	51%	32%	47%	45%
	B	9%	5%	3%	5%	4%	10%
	C	0%	0%	0%	2%	0%	1%
	Non Noté	2%	2%	9%	8%	2%	1%

Specific points to be mentioned:

The program of the first day visit was adapted together with the director the day before due to the delay of arrival of an expert (snowfall in North America).

Concerning the recruitment of young researchers, the committee is right in pointing out the importance of stabilizing the two post--docs who are playing a pivotal role in Team 3 and are still funded for 18 to 24 months. This is a priority of the new unit together with the recruitment of a young researcher (short listed by CNRS Section 25 this year at her first application) in Team 2 to develop an original project on the cerebellum that will strengthen our interactions with psychiatrists within the INC. A coordinated recruitment policy avoiding sterile concurrence between our candidates should help us to recruit these young researchers. We agreed to support one of them on an assistant-professor position, which makes sense in view of the strong involvement of our unit in the life of Paris Descartes, thanks notably to the strong investment of Team 4 in teaching, and the small proportion of (Assistant--)Professors on the profile of the new unit. Our two other candidates apply to CNRS in different sections (25 and 26). Finally and as noticed by the committee, I intend to strengthen the ties as soon as possible between the two teams constituting each research axis. This will give each axis a critical mass and impressive scientific assets and will help to merge researchers coming from two different labs. I am glad that the visiting committee well appreciated the scientific rationale of our organization and the move of all four teams towards translational research. I am confident that this will translate into a competitive and attracting laboratory with recognized international outreach.

Claude Meunier Directeur de Recherche CNRS


Grading

Once the visits for the 2012-2013 evaluation campaign had been completed, the chairpersons of the expert committees, who met per disciplinary group, proceeded to attribute a score to the research units in their group (and, when necessary, for these units' in-house teams). This score (A+, A, B, C) concerned each of the six criteria defined by the AERES. NN (not-scored) attached to a criteria indicate that this one was not applicable to the particular case of this research unit or this team.

Criterion 1 -C1 : Scientific outputs and quality ; Criterion 2 -C2 : Academic reputation and appeal ; Criterion 3 -C3 : Interactions with the social, economic and cultural environment ; Criterion 4 -C4 : Organisation and life of the institution (or of the team) ; Criterion 5 -C5 : Involvement in training through research ; Criterion 6 -C6 : Strategy and five-year plan.

 Introduction History and geographical location of the unit

The Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (LPP) has been created in 2006 by members of two research units from the Institut de Psychologie at Boulogne, the Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale (LPE) and the Laboratoire Cognition et Développement. The LPP became UMR CNRS 8158 in January 2007. It is located at the Centre Universitaire des Saints Pères and, for the audition team, at the ENS rue d'Ulm.

Management team

The director for the period 2007-2012 was Mr Kevin O'REGAN, researcher at the CNRS. Mr Andrei GOREA, researcher at the CNRS too, has been in charge of drafting the project as the future director of the unit.

AERES nomenclature

SHS4_2 : Psychology

Unit workforce

Strengths and opportunities

The main strength of the unit is undoubtedly its outstanding scientific level. Each of its teams is at the forefront of the European research and even worldwide. To take just two examples, the Vision team is the most important and creative group in this field in Europe with a huge impact, remarkable creativity and innovative projects, making of Paris a leader place for the research on vision. The audition group is unique at the theoretical and applied levels with an impressive variety of methodologies used. The two other teams (Perception Action Development and Speech Perception Development) produce high-level research with important advances in the domains of early development and infant's capacities. This scientific excellence is testified by an impressive record of publications in high-ranking journals. The LPP is therefore a jewel of French psychology and a worldwide leader in the study of perception. In this regard, the work of the director during these years should be emphasized for having conceived the project of a research group specialized on perception and for having been able to unite around him many talented researchers and to promote very good research.

The LPP is also remarkable for its ability to attract many researchers and post-doctoral students from abroad, with a dozen of internationally renowned scholars invited. This results in very good international collaborations that increase the impact of the lab.

The capacity to obtain financial support with 5 ERC grants and currently 9 national grants including 6 ANR is something probably unique in our country. It should be noted that among the ERC grants, three of them are starting grants, testifying for the outstanding quality of the young researchers of the group.

Another strength is the very good and stimulating doctoral training, something confirmed by the doctoral and post-doctoral students themselves.

Finally, but importantly, the research unit enjoys the full support of the University and the CNRS.

Weaknesses and threats

Seven out of the 19 researchers involved in the project will be aged 62 or more at the beginning of the next five-year period. Thus, several leader researchers will leave the unit in a next future.

Recommendations

Particular attention should be paid to recruitments. Many retirements that will occur in the coming years could weaken the laboratory. Maintaining this level of excellence requires not only the recruitment of tallented young researchers but also of senior researchers able to take in charge the leadership of research groups. A special effort of the University and the CNRS will probably be necessary if one wants to maintain the exceptional scientific level of the LPP. Both institutions have up to now invested many resources in this research unit and this investment might be extended.

In relation to recruitment problems, the laboratory should not be isolated from the psychology curricula of the University and from the source of recruitment of lecturers and professors these curricula constitue. Particular attention should be paid to this question within a competitive environment with several laboratories of psychology necessarily competing for a limited amount of human resources. In this respect, it could be damaging to exclusively focus on the Cogmaster, which is excellent but no longer associated with the Institut de Psychologie.

Because the next director will reach retirement age at the end of the forthcoming five-year period, a reflection should be initiated to identify potential candidates for laboratory management.

 Detailed assessments

Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

The scientific quality of the research carried out by the LPP is simply excellent. This lab is a national and international reference for the study of perception, with frequent and regular publications in world top-leading journals in the domain.

Considering the 8 permanent professors (4 ETP equivalent full time) and 15 permanent researchers (15 ETP) who have contributed to the scientific productions between 2007 and mid-2012, the unit has published 336 articles in journals appearing in the Aeres-psychology list, that is more than 14 articles per member during the 5 last years, or 3,5 articles per year and per ETP. But the main point is that most of this production has appeared in the best international journals, with high impact (Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Current Biology, TICS, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Psychological Bulletin, Neuron, Psychological Science, Developmental Science…). The production of the unit also includes 8 books, 59 chapters and numerous communications to conferences. One member of the committee has qualified this production as "stellar", a comment that needs no further development.

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

As we have seen above, this is one of the main strengths of the unit. The number of post-doctoral students has increased from 9 in 2008 to 32 today, with a large majority coming from foreign universities. Several top foreign scientists have been recruited as enseignants-chercheurs or chercheurs. The academic reputation of the unit can also be appreciated through the number of international grants obtained, with 5 ERC grants. Some of the members of the unit are regularly invited to give keynote lectures in important international conferences. Networking of the unit is also very active at the national level with the management of three GDR (Groupement De Recherche, the GDR Vision, the GDR GRAEC on experimental and clinical audiology, and the GDR Cognitive Neuroscience of Development) and with an involvement in two Réseaux Thématiques de Recherches Avancées (RTRA). At the local level, the lab is strongly implicated in the creation of the Institut des Neurosciences et de la Cognition and in the Fédération de Recherche that brings together all the neuroscience labs at the Centre des Saints Pères.

To conclude, the unit enjoys a visibility, academic reputation and appeal that can be considered as unique in French psychology.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment

The unit entertains close links with the industry, with two CIFRE grants with Technicolor and Orange Labs and a research grant with Thalès. The members of the teams specialized in developmental psychology regularly act as experts on educational and health issues (World bank, UNESCO, INSERM) and have designed tools for linguistic evaluations (Early Grade Reading Acquisition, EVALEC). Members of the Perception-Action team run a unit at the Paris Fondation Ophtalmologique to diagnose and treat visual problems, while the Vision and Perception-Action teams are contributing to renovating of exhibits at the Palais de la Découverte and the Musée de la Villette. The Audition team organizes a Journée Nationale de l'Audition that brings together industrials, clinicians and scientists interested in hearing protheses. The entire lab regularly contributes to the Nuit des Chercheurs organized by the city of Paris, or to the Fête de la Science. Overall, the members of the lab make an effort to play a role in their socio-economic and cultural environment.

Assessment of the unit's organisation and life

The director of the lab is assisted by two assistant directors. Each of the four research teams of the laboratory has a head who is responsible for his or her team and is a member of the Conseil de Laboratoire, which meets every two months. Also sitting on this Conseil are representatives from the doctoral and post-doctoral students, from the technical staff, the university teachers and the CNRS researchers. The Conseil de Laboratoire discusses issues related with recruitments, the involvement of the lab in different institutions, as well as the organization of scientific events. This Conseil discusses also the distribution of financial resources. Scientific policy is generally determined within each team, but general scientific policy or reorganization of the lab is discussed by the Conseil de laboratoire, and sometimes the Assemblée Générale is consulted. During the visit, the committee noted a positive and warm atmosphere indicating a good governance of the lab. This was confirmed by the meeting with the doctoral students. It should be noted that the transfer of direction took place without any difficulty or conflict.

Assessment of the unit's involvement in training through research

The involvement of the unit in training through research is excellent, with 43 doctoral theses defended and 32 PhD students currently working in the lab in June 2012. The unit belongs to the Doctoral School "Cerveau-Cognition-Comportement" of the University of Paris Descartes (ED 261). Training is very active, with a weekly journal club and PhD students organizing seminar to review papers or prepare conference presentations. They are also invited to present their work during the annual whole-day 'lab marathon' during which all the members of the lab and students make a short presentation of their scientific activity and projects. They receive strong incentives to publish their work. There is no doubt that PhD and post-doctoral students at the LPP benefit from a very good scientific environment and constitute a pool of young researchers who are likely to be recruited in the future.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The LPP faced a challenge with the Auditory team and a small branch of the Vision team leaving the laboratory to the Ecole Normale Supérieure due to administrative changes in the organization of the Parisian universities. This results in the loss of an important part of the initial lab that could have led to its weakening. This is not at all the case, and the laboratory proved especially reactive and innovative in these circumstances. The project presents a LPP reoganized in a new structure integrating a new research topic and reinforcing the collaborations between teams. Along with the Vision and Speech perception groups that already existed is created a new Action, Volition & Consciousness team specialized in the study of human action control, the role of feedback and cognitive load in perceptual plasticity, as well as consciousness and attention in experimental and clinical settings. Moreover, the team "Perception Action Development" is now entitled "Perception, Action, and Cognitive Development" with a wider range of developmental phenomena addressed covering topics as diverse as perception, action, concepts formation, and social cognition in infants, children, but also adults from typical and atypical populations. This results in a lab tackling a wider range of psychological functions and processes that go beyong perception. Despite this greater diversity, the possibility of cooperations between groups is preserved and even reinforced. As an example, the present director, who was member of the vision team will be integrated in the Perception, Action, and Cognitive Development team. Overall, the project is a perfect balance between novelty and innovative research topics on the one hand and the pursuit of research programs that have made the renown of the LPP on the other. LPP's vision team can be considered such as the best visual psychophysics group of Europe over the last 5 years. This was achieved not by a big mass of routine publications, but rather by a large number of high quality projects that have had significant and lasting impact on the field. Instead of covering all aspects of vision equally, the Vision team has concentrated on three core aspects of visual perception. In particular, they chose (i) to study the interaction of vision with action, (ii) to understand how visual processing can lead to visual awareness, and (iii) to investigate how vision interacts with the other senses. In each one of these areas, they achieved major breakthroughs.

One of the most puzzling problems in vision science is how the brain achieves a stable percept of the world, despite constantly changing retinal images. A senior member of the team, together with his postdoc and researchers from Germany, has investigated the functional correlates of the predictive remapping of receptive fields accompanying eye movements. They found that, briefly before the eyes start moving, attention drawn to the targets of upcoming saccades also shifted to those retinal locations that the targets would cover once the eyes had moved, facilitating future movements. This predictive remapping of attention provides an efficient mechanism for keeping track of relevant parts of the scene when frequent rapid eye movements provoke retinal smear and temporal masking.

Another big topic of debate is how sensory signals are combined from different modalities. The major question is whether multimodal signals are individually weighted, or whether there exist special processing modules sensitive to their interactions. Another member of the team and his postdoc showed that evidence is accumulated for each signal separately and that consequent decisions are flexibly coupled by logical operations. A whole bulk of previous findings has to be reinterpreted in the light of their results.

The impact of these researchers is tremendously high. One of them might be the most cited vision researcher of our day with more than ten thousand citations on Google Scholar. The director is one of the most successful researchers world-wide on visual consciousness. The other members of the group are also well cited, according to their career stages. The leader of the team is performing extremely innovative work right now, combining psychophysics with Bayesian modeling and neuroimaging. Work along these lines will have great future impact.

These researchers have both strong national and international collaborations. They are well-connected and have made Paris into the center of research on visual psychophysics. Publications of the team have regularly appeared in the leading high impact journals (Nature Neuroscience, Current Biology, PNAS). The researchers are also on the editorial boards of the leading specialized journals in the field.

The researchers are part of a number of national and international grants. Astonishingly, four of the seven vision team members now hold ERC grants. Two of them were just awarded ERC Advanced Grants, one member is a co-investigator on an Advanced Grant, and another one holds a Starting Grant. This is unheard of for any other group of this size! In addition to this, the leader of the team was coordinator of an EU-Marie-Curie training network, which is now in its 3 rd generation. The high quality of research has made the lab a highly attractive place for good students and talented foreign PostDocs.

A big effort is made to invite renowned scientists to regular colloquia. Even more important, the group organizes workshops in Paris ("Fests") where whole labs are invited. These events have become an important outlet for important questions in European vision science.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

Given the great successes of the last 5 years, it is rather unfortunate that the vision team will undergo large changes, with only 4 of the 7 members remaining. However, even at this reduced capacity, the team will undoubtedly keep being highly successful during the coming 5 years.

They have thoughtfully chosen to address three important problems in visual science during that period. Motion, space and time are "classic" topics of interest in visual perception. Visual Stability is currently a topic hotly debated, on which the group has already made groundbreaking contributions. Here, they are building on their previous work and extending it to crossmodal stability. The third key area is about eye movements and decision making, which is an upcoming topic of great interest. There is a lot of interaction between these different themes and the individual projects are only loosely assigned to themes. This will foster collaboration and produce synergy effects. The project has the potential to maintain the extremely high level quality of research the group is known for.

Conclusion

 Strengths and opportunities:

During the past 5 years, the LPP has become the most important European center for visual psychophysics. This has led to important collaborations and scientific breakthroughs. It is reflected in the great attractiveness of LPP for PostDocs world-wide. There is an opportunity to build on that strength!  Weaknesses and threats:

The biggest threat is that the current vision group has split. One member has retired, one is leaving to setup a competing group at ENS, one has setup his own team at LPP, and two other members will retire within the next 5 years.

 Recommendations:

In 5 years, only two of the four current members will be remaining. It is of utmost importance to hire some good basic vision researchers right away to join the group and lead them into the future. The audition team was created two years before the period under study, starting with 3 permanent researchers, two from CNRS and one PR, plus one engineer. Between 2007 and 2012, it has been reinforced by one scientist coming from the field of computer science. Through the use of complementary techniques from psychophysics, physiology of auditory pathways, signal processing and computational neuroscience, the choice of a common center of interest (timing in auditory processing) and the personal output of each of its participants in excellent journals, the Audition team has acquired a broad, international standing and a clear identity.

Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

The reputation of the audition team comes from their publications on three levels of investigations, grounded in psychophysics and addressed with the help of a broad range of methods (from psychophysics itself to electrophysiology to signal processing). The first theme investigated the part played by temporal features of complex sounds (envelope vs. temporal fine structure) in their perception, both in normal and hearing-impaired subjects. The second theme addressed mid-level processes involved in the analysis of auditory scenes and examined how auditory memory contributes to sound analysis. The last theme pertained to computational models and tools for signal processing. All three themes revolve around a common core: the psychoacoustics of temporal characteristics of complex sounds.

Among the major results of the team, one can single out the groundbreaking report (making the cover of the Neuron issue where it came out) that auditory memory can build up in an unsupervised manner for meaningless sequences of noise. Another intriguing series of results showing how the perception of temporal cues can be disrupted in patients with sensorineural hearing loss, even in audiometrically spared regions, raises exciting questions, the answers to which will be important for the large community of hearing-impaired people. Last, novel tools designed using cutting-edge signal processing techniques have an obviously strong clinical potential.

One of the originality in the scientific approach was to confront some mechanisms of visual processing to auditory perception. This has been successfully achieved using a paradigm of visual or auditory multistable perception revealing shared principles of perceptual organization. In addition to a publication in Current Biology, this gave rise to a special issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, co-edited by one member of the audition team.

Accordingly, the impact of the published work has been highly satisfactory, with several papers published in top generalist journals, Nature Neuroscience and Neuron; excellent broadband journals such as Journal of Neuroscience; and the best specialty journals in the field of hearing, e.g., JASA and JARO. The H-indexes of the audition team researchers testify to their impact, that is, from 32 for the most senior team member to between 14 and 20 for the younger ones. That the number of Pubmed-referenced publications has been 117 over the last 5.5 years, thus corresponding to 4.25 per researcher and per year, is to be commended.

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

The Audition team is involved in numerous national and international networks. First, a member of the group was the founder of the CNRS GDR GRAEC which succeeded in putting together a large range of scientists, clinicians and private companies working on clinical audiology. Second, one member of the audition team is also at the head of the Labex IEC (Institut d'Étude de la Cognition) which conveys an exciting dynamic of the Cognition at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). The strong implication of the team in the Cogmaster at ENS, and their ability to secure national and international grants (ANR, ERC) allowed them to attract many excellent PhD students with already an appropriate background, and who had their share of the high output of the team in international journals. Some members of the group belong to the editorial boards of high-quality journals in diverse topics from computational neuroscience (Frontiers in Neuroinformatics) to review journal (Trends in Cognitive Sciences). One member received the IUF Junior that distinguishes each year a small number of university professors for their research excellence. The Audition group organized or co-organized 17 international meetings with the participation of highlevel scientists in audition.

The ability for this team to attract large grants is impressive, both from ERC and ANR. It allowed them to attract, for at least five years, an expert professor from the USA, which already considerably reinforces their experimental strength and opens promising themes. The team is also founding member of a Labex structure.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment

The audition team is firmly embedded in clinical research through a series of studies aimed on auditory processing in hearing impaired subjects or cochlear implanted deaf patients.

In the past five years, user-friendly diagnostic methods have been developed and disseminated in the framework of multicentric research projects involving several departments of French University hospitals. The goal of these methods is to categorize patients and identify those in whom hearing aid fitting may be particularly difficult, so as to suggest more accurate guidelines for clinically-grounded choices of the parameters of sound-processing algorithms in hearing aids.

The team has established long-lasting applied-research programs with hearing aid companies, who employ former PhD students funded by CIFRE programs. The expertise of the audition group in acoustic research is highly recognized as some members of the team are involved in consulting for private companies in audio-technology.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The audition team will not participate to the project of the LPP but will join a new lab, the LSP (Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs), which has made the object of a separate AERES visit with regard to its creation as a new UMR CNRS unit.

The "second team" of the LPP in the project will be a new and very promising team, the Action, Volition & Consciousness team. The leader of this new team is a young scientist who has received the CNRS Bronze medal in 2011, and who has obtained an ERC starting grant in 2011. This team is specialized in the study of human action control, the role of feedback and cognitive load in perceptual plasticity, as well as consciousness and attention in experimental and clinical settings. No doubt that this team will attract young PhD students and post-docs, considering the high potential impact of its research program.

Conclusion  Strengths and opportunities:

High attractivity, high ability to get large grants and support from companies. Strong multidisciplinary approach, both at the scale level (from single neurons to psychophysics) and at the methodological level from animals studies to human psychophysics, from neuronal computation to technological development. As a result, innovative research with both fundamental and applied consequences.

 Weaknesses and threats:

No risk or threat at present, thanks to a wise strategy allowing the team to keep a reasonable size and remain coherent while extending its know-how.

 Recommendations:

The team is highly aware of the potential offered by interactions with other teams of their former LPP unit, interested in the psychophysics of other sensory modalities. It is thus almost needless to encourage the team members to go further in this direction in which they have already invested in a promising manner, as it will likely be unaffected by the split between the present LPP and the future LPS.

 Detailed assessments Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

The Perception-Action Development team investigates visual, proprioceptive, haptic perception and cognitive capacities as well as perception-action coupling in children from birth to childhood with some studies devoted to adults. The goal is to understand how cognitive, perceptive and motor primitives present at birth allow the newborn infant to interact with, and show some understanding of, his physical and social environment. These studies are conducted in infants and children with typical or atypical development, through intercultural and even interspecies comparisons. The team conducts outstanding research with a series of cutting-edge results of major significance such as the discovery of abstract numerical representations at the start of post-natal experience, the fact that movements of the mouth observed in the talking face enhance face recognition at birth, or that the newborn's locomotor pattern previously thought of as "walking reflex" can be elicited solely by exposure to a visual flow. Studies have also clinical implications with the discovery of a strong dissociation between physiological/biological responses and emotional/behavioral reactions to pain in autistic children. The rate of publication is high with about 2 articles per researcher per year, in journals of low, medium, and high impact (e.g., PNAS, Child Development).

Assessment of the unit's academic reputation and appeal

The Perception-Action Development team is renowned for its work on infant's capacities. In the last years, it proved appealing, attracting 3 post-doctoral students and training 18 PhD students. Most importantly, the team was joined during the quadriennal by two young researchers, one of them being awarded an ERC starting grant. The team should be reinforced in the next years by another CNRS recruitment. Thus, this research group has been especially reactive to the last AERES evaluation that stressed the need for recruitement and it will constitute the largest team in the next structure with 7 researchers.

Assessment of the unit's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment

The team has strong interactions with several hospitals. Moreover, it organizes a GDR (GDR Neurosciences Cognitives du Développement) and its members are involved in several committees and coorganize cultural events (permanent exhibitions at the Musée des Sciences de la Villette).

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

As we noted above, the five-year plan is especially innovative, with a more integrated research program in the field of development covering a variety of topics from perception to concept formation and social cognition. Apart from a continuing outstanding work in the domain of newborn capacities, projects about typical development using comparative and cross-cultural approaches are especially interesting, as well as the study of behavioural and cerebral plasticity, with direct clincal applications in the domain of psychological disorders and peceptual impairments.

Conclusion

Strengths and opportunities:

-The quality of the scientific output with the discovery of findings of major significance; -The extension of the topics of research covering a wider range of developmental phenomena from the lowest to the highest cognitive functions; -The capacity to attract top-level new researchers.

Weaknesses and threats:

-There is no identifiable weakness or threat in the team. -This team will be one of the more affected by retirements during the next five-year period. This means that the effort of recruitment must be continued; -The extended range of questions addressed by the team could lead to some scattering, but the members are sufficiently skilled to pay attention to this problem.

 Detailed assessments

Assessment of scientific quality and outputs Scientific production is regular and of very high quality, with a great majority of publications in refereed international journals, such as Cognition, Developmental Science, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, etc.

During this period, the team made several important scientific contributions, among which the demonstration of the extraction of structural regularities from the speech input by the newborns, the more important lexical role of consonants compared to vowels during the whole course of life, and the positive effect of bilingualism in the early perception of speech. The studies concern not only the earliest levels of speech perception (auditory and phonetic) and the phonological level, but also lexical, morphosyntactic and semantic processing of the oral language. The approach is mainly developmental. In this context, both the typical and the pathological (auditory deficit, autism, dyslexia, etc.) development were examined. The team attempted to show the amplitude of plasticity phenomena and to identify the cerebral correlates of deficits such as dyslexia. Their research is thus important from a fundamental as well as an applied perspective.

The research on the development of phonological skills with age and experience is inspired by quite original hypotheses, especially those that concern the origin of the invariance of consonantal features in different vocalic contexts. The demonstration of a décalage in the establishment of the processing of the enveloppe (since 6 months) and of the fine temporal structure of sounds (reaching the adult pattern by 5 years of age) is a very important contribution. One may say the same for the outcomes of the study of developmental changes in lexical prosody in hearing children and in phonological processing in children with cochlear implants.

In another line of research, it is worth to emphasize the novelty of the demonstration of the baby's capacity to encode both the adjacent and the non-adjacent repetition of syllables as well as their position in the sequence, and the fact that, according to the infra-red spectroscopy data, the Broca area, known for its sensibility to linguistic regularities in the adult, is already activated in the baby. Later, the sensitivity to grammatical forms appears since 18 months of age and the comprehension of the noun-verb agreement is reached by 30 months. Other studies, employing the functional properties of the N400 electrophysiological component and the priming technique, showed that the semantic (taxonomic) component of knowledge develops between 18 and 24 months.

Assessment of the teams's academic reputation and appeal

All the members of this team intervene regularly in teaching activities, especially in the Cogmaster (ENS/EHESS/U. Paris Descartes) and University of Poitiers. Since 2007, 19 PhD students and more than 50 from Master were supervised. The researchers are also active in counselling parents associations and diffusing the scientific lnowledge to which they contribute in the large public through TV and magazines.

Research collaboration with other national and foreign teams is significant and productive. All the team members are involved in international collaborations. Two of them belong to boards of international scientific journals. The team is part of Labex EFL and obtained 3 ANR grants (1 Young researcher, 1 DFG et 1 ESRC).

Assessment of the team's interaction with the social, economic and cultural environment

The research conducted by the team is relevant for education and health (evaluation of reading level and of non-pharmacological therapies of autism). Hence, it allows them to establish links with these sectors. Several team members acted as experts or consultants.

Assessment of the five-year plan and strategy

The team will consist of slightly the same number of researchers and professors and will present more or less the same distribution between the two categories (professors/researchers) as in the present period. The number of of PhD students is sufficient to run the planned studies. The major change, with implications for the themes, results from the very recent retirement of two members involved in the study of written language and of the retirement of 2 other very productive members that will occur by the end of the next period.

One may therefore understand quire well the changes proposed for the titles of the 3 new themes: 1. Acoustic perception and acquisition of phonology; 2. Lexico-semantic development; 3. Morphosyntactic acquisition.

In the next period, the theme will focus on spoken language and two of the themes will concern explicitly highlevel linguistic components. At the same time, the research effort will be put mainly on the developpement on language capacities, including the study of the influence of bilingualism, which benefits from several partnerships with foreign laboratories (in UK, Finland, Spain, USA and even in Asia).

Conclusion

 Strengths and opportunities:

-The team has a long experience of studying speech perception and related themes, and is internationally recognized for its publications;

-The team has just recruited two young researchers who are productive and involved in original lines of research; -The leader, in spite of his youth, presents already an important scientific record and has the leadership qualities for making the group work together in a coherent way.

 Weaknesses and threats:

The recent departure of two experienced and productive members and the expected departure, at the end of the next period, of two other similarly qualified researchers may potentially create some difficulties. However, this risk may be surmounted, given that the team has already provided the proof of its capacity to attract young researchers.

 Recommendations:

-In the course of the next period, the consequences of the expected retirement of two productive researchers (in the areas of the early stages of speech perception and the effects of bilingualism) should be anticipated, and the nature of the themes for the subsequent period should be discussed so that the potential recruitment of young researchers would take such plans into account.

-Given that the work on written language and its troubles has stopped, the relationships with the sector of education risk to be greatly reduced. For this reason, it is recommended to increase the actions of counseling and diffusion of scientific knowledge in the domains of bilingual education and deafness remediation.

Conduct or programme of visit

The visit began with a meeting of the committee for a first exchange of views. The director of the unit then presented the report and the new director presented the project. Each team leader then presented the report of his or her group and the project. These presentations were followed by a visit to the experimental booths and demonstrations. At lunch time, committee members met with representatives of the University and the CNRS and then met with doctoral students of the unit. A second meeting was held with university officials who had not been encountered during the meal. Finally, the committee met for synthesis and defining the outline of the report.

N4:

  leader: Mr Pascal MAMASSIAN (change of leader for the project: Mr Mark WEXLER) Other permanent staff (without research duties) 3 2 Other professors (PREM, ECC, etc.) N5: Other EPST or EPIC researchers (DREM, Postdoctoral students, visitorsspent at least 12 months in the unit 6  Detailed assessments Assessment of scientific quality and outputs

N6

  Other professors (PREM, ECC, etc.) 0 N5: Other EPST or EPIC researchers (DREM, Postdoctoral students, visitors, etc.) 7

  experimental booths for studies on vision, audition, speech and infant studies.

Unit workforce Number as at 30/06/2012 Number as at 01/01/2014

				2014-2018
				Number of
				project
				producers
	N1: Permanent professors and similar positions	8	6	6
	N2: Permanent researchers from Institutions and similar positions	15	11	11
	N3: Other permanent staff (without research duties)	12	8
	N4: Other professors (Emeritus Professor, on-contract Professor, etc.)	0	1	1
	N5: Other researchers from Institutions (Emeritus Research Director, Postdoctoral students, visitors, etc.)	22	2	2
	N6: Other contractual staff (without research duties)	1	2
	TOTAL N1 to N6	58	30	20
	Percentage of producers		100,00 %

Unit workforce Number as at 30/06/2012 Number as at 01/01/2014

	Doctoral students Theses defended Postdoctoral students having spent at least 12 months in the unit* Number of Research Supervisor Qualifications (HDR) taken 2

 Assessment of the unit

6 

 6 Statistiques par domaine : SHS au 10/06/2013

	Notes

Critères C1 Qualité scientifique et production C2 Rayonnement et attractivité académiques C3 Relations avec l'environnement social, économique et culturel C4 Organisation et vie de l'entité C5 Implication dans la formation par la recherche C6 Stratégie et projet à cinq ans

	A+	167	147	118	71	125	78
	A	88	96	113	110	103	122
	B	19	29	36	76	41	64
	C	2	4	2	17	5	13
	Non Noté	6	6	13	8	8	5
	Pourcentages
	Critères	C1 Qualité scientifique et production	C2 Rayonnement et attractivité académiques	C3 Relations avec l'environnement social, économique et culturel	C4 Organisation et vie de l'entité	C5 Implication dans la formation par la recherche	C6 Stratégie et projet à cinq ans
	A+	59%	52%	42%	25%	44%	28%
	A	31%	34%	40%	39%	37%	43%
	B	7%	10%	13%	27%	15%	23%
	C	1%	1%	1%	6%	2%	5%
	Non Noté	2%	2%	5%	3%	3%	2%

Qualified research supervisors (with an HDR) or similar positions

With respect to this score, the research unit concerned by this report and its in-house teams received

Team 3 :

Perception-Action Development Name of team leader: Ms Jacqueline FAGARD (change of leader for the project: Ms Sylvie CHOKRON) Theses defended 9

Workforce

Postdoctoral students having spent at least 12 months in the unit 3

Number of Research Supervisor Qualifications (HDR) taken 1

Qualified research supervisors (with an HDR) or similar positions 5

Team 4 :

Speech Perception

Name of team leader :


Ms Marie-Agnès Sari

Mr Laurent Micouin

Alan Mr

Harvey

Ms Claire Beauvineau

Jean-Claude Mr

Beloeil

Ms Évelyne Benoit

Pierre-Yves Mr

Renard

Mr Gerard Roelfes

Mr Georges

Erick Mr

INC Dufourc

Currently 10 teams and 4 in the project

SCIENTIFIC DOMAIN

The unit conducts research in chemistry that interfaces with life sciences. Topics include the design and synthesis of chemical probes for use in studies on biochemical and molecular processes, and medicinal chemistry directed at finding leads to new medicines in several therapeutic areas including inflammation, infections and cancer.

UNIT WORKFORCE

GLOBAL ASSESSMENT OF THE UNIT

The LCBPT conducts chemical research of relevance to the life sciences : synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, RNA analogues, organometallic chemistry and supramolecular chemistry. The unit's research extends into drug metabolism, drug delivery, and drug design directed at therapeutic targets relevant to infectious and immune diseases, cancer, and some neurological disorders. The unit has ten research teams, each of which has a very strong output of papers in appropriate journals, with some excellent articles in very high impact journals. The current team structure implies that too many topics are being covered by too few staff to achieve a truly competitive international position, and the unit will merge the actual teams into four teams with a more focused portfolio of projects that can benefit from the complementary expertise of the unit's scientists, engineers and technicians. By defining explicit goals for each of the new teams, focusing on important topics where the teams can expect to have high scientific and/or societal impact, and making use of existing and new national and international collaborations, the unit can expect to enhance its ability to engage with industry, secure more national and international funding, and create an even stronger scientific output in the next five years.

The evaluation reports of Hceres are available online : www.hceres.com

Evaluation of clusters of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of higher education and research institutions Evaluation of research Evaluation of doctoral schools Evaluation of programmes International evaluation and accreditation

INTRODUCTION

  HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION OF THE UNIT The Laboratory of Chemistry and Biochemistry Pharmacological and Toxicological (LCBPT) was created in 1984. It is located in the university of Paris Descartes at the "Centre Universitaire des Saints Pères" (CUSP), Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, 45 rue des Saints Pères, 75006 Paris, where it extends over 2 360 m 2 (first floor: 1 750 m 2 , second floor: 610 m 2 ). The LCBPT was directed by Mr Daniel MANSUY until 2006, then by Ms Isabelle ARTAUD from 2006 to 2014, then by Ms Francine ACHER from 2014 until February 2016, MANAGEMENT TEAM Since February 2016, the unit is directed by Ms Marie-Agnes SARI (Paris Descartes), with Mr Laurent MICOUIN as deputy director. HCERES NOMENCLATURE ST4: chemistry.