Ourania Semelidou selected by the ATIP-Avenir programme

Ourania Semelidou currently a post-doctoral researcher in Andreas Frick’s team at the Neurocentre Magendie, is one of the ATIP-Avenir 2026 prize-winners. Ourania Semelidou’s team will be created in 2027 at the IMN.

Conceived as part of a partnership between Inserm and the CNRS, the ATIP-Avenir programme enables around twenty young researchers each year to set up their own research team in the fields of life sciences and health. Candidates’ projects are assessed by an international jury for the written phase and the interview.

Ourania Semelidou was awarded the Marian Diamond Prize in 2026. The article about her award gave us the opportunity to look back on her scientific career and her commitment.

Ourania Semelidou’s project

Neural mechanisms of social salience and their disruption in conditions with social dysfunction.

Social salience, the brain’s ability to assign relevance to social stimuli, is essential for attention, decision-making, and adaptive behavior. Among social stimuli, social touch constitutes one of the most direct channels of communication and is essential for social bonding and emotional regulation. However, we still do not know how salience is allocated to positive social touch or whether this process is disrupted in conditions characterized by social dysfunction, where positive social stimuli have a reduced impact on behavior.

My research project aims to understand how the brain allocates salience and prioritizes social touch, and how this process is altered in conditions marked by social dysfunction, such as autism and social anxiety disorder. To address these questions, we will combine an innovative socio-tactile decision-making task in mice with multi-scale functional cortical imaging, autonomic measures of attention, optogenetics, behavioral profiling, and computational analyses.

This project will reveal the neural underpinnings of salience allocation to social touch and will establish a mechanistic framework in which positive social touch salience represents a quantitative marker of social function and dysfunction. By capturing individual behavioral and neural profiles, this work will contribute to the development of transdiagnostic biomarkers for patient stratification and advance circuit-based approaches that move beyond traditional diagnosis-based categories.