Meet DANDRITE's New Team Leader: Noëmie Mermet-Joret

“I remember entering this office – an office from the 70s with very old, classic French-style wooden furniture. And there was this frame on the wall with butterflies pinned with needles and a microscope on the desk. Oh my! It blew my mind.” 

For Noëmie Mermet-Joret it all began in her late grandfather's office when she was about seven or eight years old. Alongside what Noëmie describes as “a collection of weird African animals in formalin”, she inherited the microscope that had caught her eye in the middle of her grandfather’s desk that day – and with it, the curiosity that would shape her career.

Everything had to be investigated. Plants were scrutinized. So were "samples" from her dog's mouth ("it didn't really like that"), while insects were caught and placed in boxes filled with grass and leaves in unsuccessful attempts to keep them alive. And when the opportunity came to do a work-experience placement at the age of 11 or 12, Noëmie knew exactly where she wanted to go: Her aunt was a pharmacist working in a laboratory, analyzing blood samples for disease.

“And I really loved it. I really loved it. I've always been super fascinated by science,” says Noëmie.

Growing within DANDRITE

One question led to another. What began with epilepsy research gradually took Noëmie across different areas of neuroscience. Along the way, she mastered increasingly sophisticated techniques to investigate one overarching question: how the brain learns, remembers and adapts.

In April this year, Noëmie Mermet-Joret took up a position as Group Leader at PACE – the Lundbeck Foundation Parkinson's Disease Research Center in Aarhus.

Soon after, she became one of DANDRITE's two newly appointed Team Leaders. The role marks a new chapter at an institute she already knows well, having joined DANDRITE in 2017 as a postdoctoral researcher in Sadegh Nabavi's lab.

“I've been growing as a scientist within the DANDRITE community, which I've always found to be extremely engaging and exciting,” says Noëmie.

“What I really like is that DANDRITE brings together people from very different backgrounds – not only in terms of research topics, but also techniques. I've collaborated with different groups here for many years, and it's always inspiring to see what others are working on and to build collaborations with people whose expertise complements your own.”

Today, her own research focuses on the limbic circuits that shape behavior and memory – and on understanding why these networks are particularly vulnerable in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease. To tackle these questions, her lab combines in vivo calcium imaging, electrophysiology and transcriptomics to study the activity, connectivity and molecular identity of individual cell populations.

“This integrated approach lets us ask which circuits are active during a given behaviour, and how their physiological and molecular state, as well as their connectivity, change as the disease progresses,” she explains.

Although her research focus has evolved, her ties to DANDRITE remain strong. She continues to collaborate closely with Sadegh Nabavi on several projects, she is finalizing publications from her time in his lab, and will continue supervising DANDRITE students until they complete their studies.

“I'm going to be one of only a few researchers at PACE using these in vivo techniques to study how Parkinson's disease spreads through the brain. Keeping my connection to DANDRITE is therefore very important to me. I can continue to benefit from the community, while PACE and DANDRITE can also benefit from each other's expertise.”

A long-held ambition

Although becoming a group leader has long been Noëmie's ambition, she says the biggest question was never whether she wanted the role – but whether she would get the opportunity.

“I always wanted to be a group leader,” she says. “Of course, I had some hesitations along the way, but it was more about whether it would be possible because of funding and contract limitations.”

After moving to Denmark eight years ago, she and her husband built a life in Aarhus, where their two children were born and now speak fluent Danish. Like many early-career researchers, she spent years moving from one short-term contract to the next, never quite knowing what would happen when the current one expired.

Now, with her own group beginning to take shape, she has recruited her first student assistant and master's student and hopes to welcome a PhD student later this year.

The transition, she says, feels surprisingly natural.

“Over the past few years, I've been supervising a lot of students, and I realized that this is something I very much like to do. Taking decisions, helping students, being there for them – I really enjoy it.” During her years as an assistant professor, she often found herself balancing several roles at once: running experiments, supervising students and helping manage the lab.

“Now I'm looking forward to having more of the leadership role and stepping a bit away from the bench. But I still want to do experiments because I love it. I think I would be very sad if I don't look through a microscope myself.”

Making space for parents in science

For Noëmie, one topic is impossible to separate from life as a researcher: being a mother.

“Something that I often get asked by students, especially, is how I do it with kids,” she says. “Because it is difficult to be a woman in science. It's difficult – and even more to be a mother in science.”

As an expat family with two full-time jobs and no grandparents nearby, balancing research with family life has required careful planning, she says. It has also taught her to prioritize, delegate and make the most of the time she has.

“I really try to separate work and family life,” she says. “When things go wrong in the lab and I go home, my kids help me not think about it anymore. And the opposite is true too, when I have a tough day at home with cranky children, sitting with my laptop in the evening to do my work also calms me down.”

Rather than seeing her family as a limitation, Noëmie has always tried to include them. When a Lundbeck Foundation grant took her to Boston to learn a new technique, the whole family came along. Her daughter has even joined her at DANDRITE retreats.

At the same time, Noëmie believes academia still has work to do to better support parents, particularly during the first years of a child's life. It is a topic she has strongly focused on in the past when she tried to encourage new initiatives at AU, and she intends to keep working on it.

“The challenges are there, and they must be seen and talked about,” she says.

And for Noëmie, that conversation starts with visibility.

“When I started my postdoc, I would see women in the field and ask myself: ‘Do they have a family? Do they have kids? How do they manage?’ Now students ask me the same question. Talking openly about it – and showing that women in science can have children – really helps the younger generation.”

A picture that never left

More than 50 years after they were collected, the preserved snakes and other curious specimens – part of the “collection of weird African animals in formalin” Noëmie inherited from her grandfather – still sit in a cupboard in her home, reminding her of the visit to her late grandfather's house where it all began. However, she is quick to point out that getting passionate it is not simply a matter of being exposed to science.

These days, her own eight-year-old daughter is far less captivated by nature than her mother ever was: “My eight-year-old cannot care less. I've tried many times to spark her interest for science, nature and animals, but she's more like her dad, her head always in a book” says Noëmie with a smile.

“But when I think about how it all started,” she says, “I always have this picture of this office with the butterflies and the microscope.”

Read more about Noëmie's research