Profile

Frédéric Isel is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Paris Nanterre – Paris Lumières. He heads the CNRS research unit - Models, Dynamics, Corpora -, an interdisciplinary research group which combines data from linguistic corpora with behavioral and neuroimaging methods to model the linguistic functioning at different levels: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. The studies on formalization in natural language processing are conducted in a sociolinguistic dynamics.  

Neurocognition of language

Professor Isel gained his PhD in Psychology from the University of Paris Descartes in 1997. Originally trained as experimental psycholinguist on word recognition, his longstanding interest focused on the relation between language and brain, and in particular on the neurodynamics of spoken language processes studied from electroencephalographical data. He was a postdoctoral fellow and then research fellow for 8 years at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Neuropsychology Department, headed by Professor Angela D. Friederici. Then, he joined the research group of Professor Christian Büchel at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience in the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) of Hamburg. He also worked three years at the Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology (Professor Andreas Engel). He returned to Paris (France) in 2010 and he was Associate Professor in Cognitive Psychology at Sorbonne Paris Cité - Paris Descartes University until 2015. From 2015, Frédéric Isel is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Nanterre – Paris Lumières.

Description of Research Interests:

The functional architecture of language system and its neuroanatomical basis.

How our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how language diversity can be mastered by our minds?

Use of behavioral and neuroimaging methods with young adults as well as patients.

The neurodynamics of the processes of emotional perception, reactivity and regulation: A fundamental and a clinical approaches. 

The relation between language and emotion is studied with emotional phonemes, words, sentences with different syntactic structures, and discourses. The goal of our investigations is to understand how language, below and beyond lexical information, conveys emotional information in reception, emission and intercommunication situations. In particular, we are interested to better understand how linguistic constructions can constrain specific emotional interpretations. Corpus of emotional linguistic materials are developed at the MoDyCo Lab and are then used in an experimental approach. We employ different experimental paradigms (oddball, induction, priming, violation) combined with different recording techniques - EEG (ERP/source localisation, time-frequency analyses, cluster analyses, coherence analyses, resting states) and fMRI - in healthy individuals as well as in patients with bipolar disorder.    

These researches are conducted in collaboration with the following institutes:

• Hôpital Albert-Chenevier, Créteil, France (Prof. Chantal Henry, psychiatre)
• CEA, NEUROSPIN, Institut d'Imagerie Biomédicale (Dr Josselin Houenou, médecin psychiatre)
• University of Geneva, Neuroscience of Emotion and Affective Dynamics Lab, Suisse Grandjean (Prof. Didier Grandjean, PhD)

Education:

Paris Descartes University, M.A., Psychology, 1994

Paris Descartes University, Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, 1997

Paris Descartes University, Habilitation in Psychology, 2010

Career:

1994 – 1997     Research Assistant, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,

                          Laboratoire de  Psychologie Expérimentale, Paris Descartes University  

1998 – 2001     Visiting Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive

                          and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany 

2002 – 2005     Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive

                          and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany 

2005 – 2008     Senior Research Fellow, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

                           & Research Centre on Multilingualism-SFB 538

2008 – 2009     Senior Research Fellow, Department of Neurophysiology

                           and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf 

2009 – 2015     Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology,

                          University Paris Descartes 

2015 –              Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

                         Paris Nanterre - Paris Lumières University