Lucille Duquenoy

Lucille completed her bio-engineering diploma from the engineering school AgroParisTech, in Paris, France (2020). During her time at AgroParisTech, she interned at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris in the laboratory of Prof. Frederic Marion-Poll (2016-2018) and at Yale University, USA in the laboratory of Prof. John Carlson (2018) where she explored the peripheral coding of salt sensing in insects. Next, she joined Prof Scott Waddel’s lab at the University of Oxford to study the neural circuits for learning and memory formation in fruit flies (2019). Lucille then specialised further in neuroscience and completed a first MSc in Life Sciences specialised in Neuroscience at ENS Ulm in Paris, France (2020) during which she interned in the laboratory of Prof. Tiago Branco at the UCL in London and studied the physiological properties of neurons driving the fight or flight response in mice. Next, she was awarded a fully funded position to complete a second MSc in Neuroscience at University of Oxford (2021).

Lucille then continued onto a DPhil in Oxford (2021-2025) in the laboratory of Prof. Scott Waddell and Prof. Stephanie Cragg during which she used a novel inter-specie approach and set up new techniques to explore the mechanisms of dopamine release, a neurotransmitter crucial for normal reward circuitry, movement and action selection.
She is now a post-doctoral researcher in Prof. Stephanie Cragg’s group, and her work shed light on a decades-long debate in the field concerning the role of acetylcholine in the modulation of dopamine release in the murine striatum. These mechanisms are particularly important as disruption of patterns of dopamine release are the cause of tremors in Parkinsons disease, or addiction for instance.