Camilla Bellone

Camilla Bellone (born c. 1975) is an Italian neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Department of Basic Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland.

Bellone's laboratory explores the molecular mechanisms and neural circuits underlying social behavior and probes how defects at the molecular and circuit level give rise to psychiatric disease states such as Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Bellone was born in Italy in 1975.

Bellone studied pharmacology at the University of Milano in 1998, and found a mentor in Monica Di Luca, a neuropharmacologist.

She completed her Master's in Pharmacy.

Bellone became fascinated by neuroscience and developed a passion for answering the many unknown questions about brain function.

In Di Luca's lab, Bellone studied protein-protein interactions and signalling pathways in the postsynaptic compartment as well as the role of PSD-95 in neuronal stability and homeostasis.

Bellone stayed at the University of Milano to begin her graduate studies exploring the molecular biology and structural composition of the synapse.

Bellone realized that she wanted to go beyond protein-protein interactions and explore synaptic activity and dynamic function.

Bellone reached out to Christian Lüscher at the University of Geneva because he was exploring synaptic plasticity and synaptic transmission.

Lüscher accepted Bellone into his lab and the University of Milan continue to fund her PhD abroad, so Bellone moved to Geneva.

After officially joining the Lüscher Lab in 2002, Bellone began studying synaptic physiology in the context of drug addiction.

Bellone learned new techniques in electrophysiology by studying µ-opioid receptor physiology at the synapse and was then ready to answer her own questions about AMPA and NMDA receptor signalling within the midbrain dopaminergic reward circuitry.

In Bellone's first author paper in 2005, she elucidate the mechanisms of long-term depression (LTD) in the glutamatergic synapses onto Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) dopamine neurons.

Upon activation of dopaminergic VTA synapses, Bellone found a metabotropic glutamate receptor mediated redistribution of AMPARs such that naive AMPARs were switched for GluR2 containing AMPARs leading to LTD. After this discovery, Bellone moved to an ex vivo model of cocaine addiction to understand the neuroplastic changes following cocaine abuse.

Bellone found that cocaine caused significant increases in AMPA:NMDA ratio, a sign of neuroplastic adaptation, as well as a recruitment of AMPARs to the synapse that lack GluR2.

However, Bellone was able to reverse this neuroplastic cocaine adaptation by stimulating mGluR1s.

Bellone completed her PhD and joined the lab of Roger Nicoll at the University of California, San Francisco.

Shortly after joining the Nicoll Lab, Bellone published a first author paper in Neuron exploring the trafficking of NMDA receptors in hippocampal pyramidal cells in newborn mice.

Bellone found that synaptic activity in neonatal hippocampal synapses can cause a change in the subunit composition of NMDARs.

The dynamic nature of NMDAR subunit composition that Bellone described in neonatal synapses holds the potential to transform a synapse from one with a broad window for spike-timing plasticity to one with very reduced window.

In 2007, Bellone returned to Switzerland planning to pursue a career in academia.

From 2007 until 2011, Bellone worked in Lüscher's lab as a Maître Assistante where she began to transition from the mentored-phase of her career to an independent career.

During her further training in the Lüscher Lab, Bellone explored the effects of drugs of abuse on synaptic plasticity and physiology in the dopaminergic reward system.

In 2010, Bellone followed up on her findings from graduate school regarding AMPAR redistribution following cocaine exposure.

Bellone and her colleagues found that, not only do other drugs of abuse also elicit the same AMPAR redistribution, but also optogenetically stimulating the VTA dopamine neurons drives the same redistribution in the absence of drugs.

The following year, Bellone highlighted the effects of cocaine exposure in utero on maturation of glutamatergic transmission in VTA dopamine neurons.

In her paper published in Nature Neuroscience, Bellone showed that the glutamate receptor switch that occurs postnatally is delayed and mGluR1 function is impaired due to in utero cocaine exposure.

Bellone was also able to show that positively modulating mGluR1 in vivo was sufficient to rescue the abnormal maturation due to in utero cocaine exposure.

In 2010, Bellone was awarded the Ambizione Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, a grant meant to support young researchers in starting their own independent projects at Swiss higher education institutions.

For Bellone, this grant helped her to transition towards an independent career in neuroscience.

Bellone had the idea to use her diverse skills from exploring the dopaminergic reward system towards exploring this system in the context of social reward.

After spending much of her training looking at these circuits and their adaptions to drug rewards, she wanted to understand how the dopaminergic reward system encodes social rewards and drives social behaviors.

In 2014, Bellone applied to the University of Lausanne to start her own lab.

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Bellone became an assistant professor in the Department of Fundamental Neuroscience at the University of Lausanne.

Her lab at UNIL focused on understanding the development of the brain's reward circuitry, the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system, in mouse models.

Using various techniques, both in vivo and ex vivo, Bellone explored how perturbations to this circuitry affect social motivation.

Bellone's work aims to help understand the neural basis for complex social behaviors and how this circuitry might be implicated in psychiatric disorders characterized by aberrant social behaviors, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Bellone applied for a position back at the University of Geneva.

She was offered a position in 2016 as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor to the Department of Basic Neuroscience at the University of Geneva.