Céline Drieu

Dr. Céline Drieu received her undergraduate training in Paris, France, earning a bachelor’s degree from René Descartes University and a master’s degree from Pierre and Marie Curie University. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience in the laboratory of Dr. Michaël Zugaro at the Collège de France where she investigated cell assembly sequences in the hippocampus and their roles in spatial memory (Cei, Girardeau, Drieu et al., Nature Neuroscience 2014; Drieu and Zugaro, Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience 2019). During her doctoral work, she demonstrated that fast time-scale sequences of hippocampal place cells during exploration are necessary for subsequent sleep replay, establishing a causal link between online sequential activity and memory consolidation during sleep (Drieu et al., Science, 2018). This work was recognized with the “Major Breakthrough in Biology” prize from the French Academy of Sciences.

Céline joined Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Patricia Janak. She was awarded a Kavli NDI Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship to collaborate with Dr. Kishore Kuchibhotla, investigating how sensory cortex contributes to associative learning. Combining a novel behavioral paradigm, longitudinal two-photon imaging across weeks, low-rank tensor decomposition to uncover latent, multi-timescale dynamics, and closed-loop optogenetics, she showed that the auditory cortex is far from being solely a perceptual machine; instead, it encodes reward prediction and behavioral suppression, signals that are critically involved in learning and performance, respectively, in an auditory-guided instrumental task (Drieu et al., Nature 2025). She subsequently received a BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 award to explore large-scale cortical and subcortical network computations underlying this learning.

In 2026, Céline joined the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University as an Assistant Professor. She founded the 'Brain-wide Computations for Learning and Memory' lab, which investigates how distributed neural circuits generate memory-guided, adaptive behavior. Learn more about the lab research.