Dr. Anne Simon

Anne obtained her Ph.D. in Paris, France in 1998, in the laboratory of Thomas Préat, an internationally known specialist in the field of learning and memory in Drosophila. She studied the effect on adult central brain structure and development of a mutation affecting learning and memory. She pursued a post-doctoral training in the field of fly behavior in the laboratory of Seymour Benzer, the father of behavioral genetics. During her time in his team, she discovered that steroid hormones in Drosophila control adult behavior and longevity.

To broaden her exposure to research directly relevant to human health and disease, she then worked in a human genetics lab for a year at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. This experience allowed Anne to think more clearly about how the fly can be used to solve problems relevant to human behavioral disorders. In the next step of her career, as an assistant Research Faculty at UCLA in the team of David Krantz, an expert in the study of monoamine neurotransmission, she specifically studied the effect of mutations of VMAT on controlling monoamine levels and various aspects of adult behavior. She also designed new paradigms to study social behavior in the fruit fly.

In 2008, Anne changed coasts to purse these projects, conducted by undergraduate researchers in her lab at York College of the City University of New-York, a teaching-oriented institution, where she spent 5 years.

Anne joined Western as a Limited Term Faculty in 2013, focusing her first few years on teaching, while establishing in parallel a research group and obtaining research founds from NSERC. In 2021, her position was switched to tenure-track, and in 2022 she became Associate Prof with tenure. Her work at Western University focuses on dissecting the mechanisms underlying the “space bubble”, i.e., the comfort zone, or social distance between two individuals, while teaching Genetics courses.

You can see Anne's academic genealogy on Neurotree.