![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/27\/2026\/07\/camille-mazo-iins-3.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nCan you tell us about the key steps of your career that led you to apply for this competition?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Camille Mazo: <\/strong>During my studies, I became passionate about neuroscience and decided to pursue a master\u2019s degree in this field. As a student at the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure de Cachan, near Paris, I seized the opportunity to do a one-year internship at Harvard, where I studied the neuronal basis of olfaction. This experience sparked my interest in how the brain shapes sensory perception. I then joined Pierre-Marie Lledo\u2019s lab for my PhD, where I studied how internal neuronal circuits influence olfactory processing and perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During my PhD, I really enjoyed the life of a scientist: formulating hypotheses, finding ways to test them, setting up and conducting experiments, analyzing data, developing new ideas, and eventually preparing and publishing scientific articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I then moved to Portugal for a postdoc in Leopoldo Petreanu\u2019s lab. This was another fundamental step in my career. I learned a lot there, especially how creative science can be, and how much one can build themselves to really address a scientific question in depth. During this period, I became interested in how the brain represents the location of objects through vision and audition, and how it builds a sense of where objects are around us based on sensory inputs and prior knowledge about the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why I joined Naoya Takahashi\u2019s lab at the IINS: to extend this question to the sense of touch. The vibrant environment in the lab and the exciting project where perfect matches to conduct my research and I decided to try to get a researcher position here!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why did you choose IINS for your second postdoc?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Naoya Takahashi is an excellent scientist and an expert in the tactile system. He had set up his lab a few years earlier and was developing new research directions, including how mental representations of the body influence touch. Since body representation is also involved in spatial perception, this was a great match for my research interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IINS is also one of the leading neuroscience institutes, located within the Bordeaux Neurocampus. It therefore seemed like the perfect place to explore my scientific questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The CNRS competition is known for being highly selective and you succeeded brilliantly. How did you prepare your application? Do you have any advice for those who might want to apply?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n First of all, this was my third time applying to the competition. So I learned from my previous mistakes and from the feedback I received from the jury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The interview is a very specific exercise. In 15 minutes, candidates have to present both their past research and their future project \u2014 basically the last ten years and the next ten years \u2014 to a broad panel of neuroscientists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My main advice would be to make sure that your key messages are clear, especially for the non-specialists in the jury. At the end of the interview, the jury should remember who you are as a scientist, what your expertise is, and what your future research project is about in the big picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, remember that after the 15-minute presentation, there are 25 minutes of questions \u2014 so don\u2019t relax too soon after the presentation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a CNRS researcher, you\u2019ll have more autonomy but also new responsibilities. What will be the major changes in your daily work life?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As a CNRS researcher, I will be able to develop a long-term research program. This is very exciting because it means I can now think beyond one specific project and build a broader line of research around the questions that motivate me most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, I will be more involved in applying for grants, and building collaborations. I will also directly supervise PhD students, postdocs, and interns, while continuing to run my own experiments. I think this balance is important: staying close to the data and the experiments helps me keep a concrete view of the science, while supervision allows me to help younger scientists develop their own ideas and skills. I will also be contributing more to the scientific life of the institute and the wider research community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My daily work will therefore probably become more diverse and I see this new position as a transition: I will still be doing science very directly, but with a stronger role in shaping projects, supporting people, and building a research direction for the coming years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that you\u2019re a researcher, what are your goals for the coming years?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the coming years, my main goal is to build the foundations of my long-term research program. Until now, as a PhD student and postdoc, I have mostly worked on projects that had to fit within a limited time frame. As a CNRS researcher, I can now think on a longer timescale and ask broader questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The central question I want to address is how the brain transforms sensory inputs into a perception of space. In other words, how do we know where objects are around us, based on information coming from our senses?<\/p>\n\n\n\n My first objective will be to better understand this process in the sense of touch. I want to study how tactile information from the whiskers is transformed in the brain into a representation of object location. This means identifying the brain areas and circuits involved, and understanding whether these neural representations are directly linked to the animal\u2019s perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More broadly, I would like to use these first projects as building blocks for a larger question: how does the brain construct a coherent representation of space across different senses, such as touch, vision and audition?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research can be very demanding. How do you plan to balance your professional and personal life with this new status?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I have an eight-month-old baby, so this is a particularly relevant question! Being a young dad is demanding, and I am very grateful to my amazing wife for all the hard work we are going through together. Science requires a lot of work, but we are also lucky that it can be flexible. This flexibility makes it easier to be present for my family when needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Comments collected by Am\u00e9lie Di Bella<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Discover our new permanent researcher project, ambitions and some advice on the CNRS competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":1372,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-highlight","category-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1370"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1388,"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions\/1388"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iins.u-bordeaux.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}