Rosa Cossart is the Director of the Institute of Mediterranean Neurobiology (INMED, INSERM U1249, AMU), affiliated to INSERM and Aix-Marseille University, a pioneering Institute in the field of Systems Developmental Neuroscience. After graduating in Mathematics and Physics from the Ecole Centrale Paris, she studied the functional rewiring of GABAergic circuits in epilepsy during her PhD with Drs. Bernard and Ben-Ari. As a postdoctoral fellow with Pr. Yuste at Columbia University, she pioneered the use of calcium imaging to study cortical circuit function. Her lab made seminal contributions to the understanding of how development scaffolds hippocampal circuits. They discovered “hub cells” and more recently “assemblies” forming the functional building blocks of hippocampal function. Her work has been rewarded by several prizes, including the INSERM Research Prize and the CNRS Silver Medal. She has been awarded three times a European Research Council grant.