Paul Lucassen leads the Brain Plasticity group at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. Following his biomedical training, he completed his PhD with Dick Swaab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in 1995, followed by a postdoc with Ron De Kloet in Leiden, after which he joined Marian Joels at UvA in 1998, where he was appointed full professor in 2011. His Brain Plasticity group aims to understand how our brain adapts to a changing, and often challenging, environment, studying the hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus, brain regions involved in cognition, stress, homeostasis, and in various disorders. Plasticity is approached from the molecular, structural, functional, and behavioural levels, focusing on how brain plasticity is modified by lifestyle factors, including early-life stress, nutrition, inflammation, physical exercise, enriched environment, and psychoactive drugs, and on how plasticity is involved in metabolic and brain disorders such as TBI, depression, and dementia. A key interest is adult neurogenesis, a unique form of structural plasticity in which stem cells continue to produce new neurons in the adult brains of various species, including humans, and are involved in various aspects of brain function. Lucassen's group combines molecular, cellular, and omics analyses with in vitro and rodent models, human brain imaging, human postmortem brain, and cohort studies. He serves as WP co-lead of the Alzheimer consortium MODEM, co-recipient of the Urban Mental Health grant, and the ME/CFS consortium on chronic fatigue, and co-recipient of a Gravitation grant for the Institute for Chemical Neuroscience on molecular mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders.
