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James Poulet
James Poulet (* 1975) is a British neurobiologist.

Poulet studied biology at the University of Bristol (graduated with top marks in 1998) and received his doctorate in zoology from the University of Cambridge in 2002 with Berthold Hedwig. As a post-doctoral student, he worked at Hedwig's laboratory in Cambridge and from 2005 at the EPFL's Brain-Mind Institute in Lausanne with Carl Petersen. In 2009 he became group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin-Buch. He is in the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence.

He examined the interplay between the regulation of sensory perception and behavior on the level of neural circuits (up to the synaptic level).

For example, he showed how male crickets switch their own hearing perception down so that they do not become deaf from their own (very loud) chirping during mating, but at the same time can still perceive noises from potential enemies and rivals in the vicinity. Poulet identified the nerve cells involved in switching the sensitivity of the hearing system on and off.

He also investigated the neural mechanism of switching between brain states such as wakefulness and half-sleep (test subjects here were mice). [4]

In 2013 he received the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstädter Prize for young scientists. He has received the Gedge Prize from Cambridge University, the Rolleston Memorial Prize from Oxford University and the Young Investigator Award from the International Society of Neuroethology. In 2010 he received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.