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Excellence-Class Professor Martin GIURFA
Born	September 1962 (age 62) Lima, Peru
Nationality	Argentinean, French
Alma mater	Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEyN), University of Buenos Aires, Free University of Berlin
Scientific career
Fields	Neuroethology, Neurosciences, Animal Behavior Cognition, Learning & Memory, Invertebrates
Institutions	Paul Sabatier University Free University of Berlin University of Buenos Aires
Doctoral advisor	Josué Núñez
Other academic advisors	Héctor Maldonado
Website	cbi-toulouse.fr/fr/equipe-giurfa-devaud twitter.com/martingiurfa

Martin Giurfa is an Argentinean-French neurobiologist and neuroethologist (born September 1962), member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, and the IUF and distinguished for his work on the neural mechanisms of cognition in invertebrates, which he mostly explored using honeybees as models for understanding basic principles of learning and memory.

Life and career

Early Years in South America

Martin Giurfa was born in Lima, Peru, from an Argentinean mother who raised him alone and registered him as an Argentinean citizen. He grew up in Lima where he attended the French School Lycée franco-péruvien and moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina at the end of 1980 to study Biology at the University of Buenos Aires. Argentina was still under control of the military dictatorship (National Reorganization Process) and Martin Giurfa enrolled in the student movement resisting dictatorial oppression. He played an influential role in that movement and in 1984, after the return of the democracy to Argentina, he became president of the Student Union of his faculty, the Faculty of Natural and Exact Sciences. Based on his social and political engagement, he opted then definitely for the Argentinean citizenship.

Upon the return of the democracy, as many students in the Faculty of Sciences, he benefited from the return to Argentina of numerous prestigious Argentinean scientists who were in exile during the dictatorship and who participated in the academic reconstruction of Argentina. He met then Prof. Josué Núñez, who trained him in the field of insect behavioral physiology and contacted him with German academia, in particular with Prof. Randolf Menzel Free University of Berlin, a leading neurobiologist working on color vision, learning and memory in honeybees.

Career in Europe

After obtaining his PhD Degree from the University of Buenos Aires under the supervision of Josué Núñez, he moved to Germany in 1990, to work at the institute of Neurobiology of the Free University of Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Menzel. He was first Fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and then Fellow of the Alexander_von_Humboldt_Foundation. His first works focused on color and shape vision in honeybees leading to the discovery of color preferences and color detection mechanisms by bees .

His work on symmetry categorization by honeybees in 1996 followed by his demonstration of concept learning in bees represented a turning point for the field of insect behavior, as they promoted a novel cognitive perspective to analyze honey bee behavior and decision making. This framework represented conceptual switch for a research domain, which had mostly attributed limited cognitive capacities to insects until then. In 1997, he obtained his Habilitation Degree of the Free University of Berlin and became group leader and assistant professor at the institute of Neurobiology of that University.

In 2001, he moved to Toulouse, France, as a Professor of Neurosciences of Paul Sabatier University. In 2003, he created the Research Center on Animal Cognition, a pluridisciplinary research institute depending both on Paul Sabatier University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, which focuses on the mechanisms of cognitive processing in various animal species and which he directed until 2017. From 2008 to 2012, he was President of the National Committee of Neurosciences of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and served in numerous French and European boards of neurosciences. In 2016, he adopted the French nationality. He has produced significant contributions dissecting the neural mechanisms of learning and memory in bees and other insects.

Martin Giurfa is a recipient of the Silver Medal of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and of an Advanced Fellowship from the European Research Council (ERC). He is also an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium and a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France,, . He is an Honors Professor of the University of Buenos Aires and the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University.

Martin Giurfa has published ca. 200 articles in international scientific journals in the fields of insect cognition, insect neurobiology and insect behavior many of them highly cited. He is an Associate Editor of many scientific journals such as EJN, Learning & Memory, Animal Cognition and Frontiers in Behavioral Neurosciences, among others. He is a member of the Faculty of 1000 and deploys an intensive science dissemination activity to render scientific knowledge to broad audiences. During the COVID-19 pandemics he established a highly attended series of virtual scientific seminars “to provide scientific stimulation and keep moral high in difficult times”.

Research achievements

Martin Giurfa has pioneered the field of insect cognition and has investigated during several decades elemental and non-elemental forms of learning. He adopted conceptual frameworks from experimental psychology to address questions on olfactory learning and memory in honeybees and performed the first experiments showing concept learning in insects trained to solve visual discriminations. He grounded thereby a field he termed “cognitive neuroethology” in which the neural bases of the cognitive capacities of animals are studied in the framework of their natural environment. He has developed his research addressing questions both at the behavioral level, establishing various novel protocols of conditioning ,, and at the neural level, using multiple invasive techniques to record neural activity in the bee brain, using calcium imaging recordings, electrophysiology and neuropharmacological interference, among others . His discoveries have changed the way scientists regard insects and have brought, in particular, wide attraction and respect towards honeybees.

Bibliography

Journal articles: most highly cited

• Giurfa M, Eichmann B, Menzel R (1996) Symmetry perception in an insect. Nature 382:458- 461. doi: 10.1038/382458a0.

• Giurfa M, Zhang S, Jenett A, Menzel R, Srinivasan MV (2001) The concepts of 'sameness' and 'difference' in an insect. Nature 410(6831):930-933. doi: 10.1038/35073582.

• Menzel R, Giurfa M (2001) Cognitive architecture of a mini-brain: the honeybee. Trends in cognitive sciences 5 (2), 62-71. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01601-6.

• Stach S, Benard J, Giurfa M (2004) Local-feature assembling in visual pattern recognition and generalization in honeybees. Nature 429(6993):758-761. doi: 10.1038/nature02594.

• Guerrieri F, Schubert M, Sandoz JC, Giurfa M (2005) Perceptual and neural olfactory similarity in honeybees. PLoS Biology 3(4): e60. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030060.

• Giurfa M (2007) Behavioral and neural analysis of associative learning in the honeybee: a taste from the magic well. Journal of Comparative Physiology A 193 (8), 801-824. doi: 10.1007/s00359-007-0235-9

• Giurfa M, Sandoz JC (2012) Invertebrate learning and memory: fifty years of olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response in honeybee. Learning & memory 19 (2), 54-66. doi: 10.1101/lm.024711.111.

• Devaud JM, Papouin T, Carcaud J, Sandoz JC, Grünewald B, Giurfa M (2015) Neural substrate for higher-order learning in an insect: Mushroom bodies are necessary for configural discriminations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112(43):E5854-62. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1508422112.

• Giurfa M (2013) Cognition with few neurons: higher-order learning in insects. Trends in Neurosciences 36(5):285-94. doi:10.1016/j.tins.2012.12.011.

• Avarguès-Weber A, Combe M, Dyer A, Giurfa M (2012) Simultaneous mastering of two abstract concepts by a miniature brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109:7481- 7486. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202576109.

Journal articles: recent

• Giurfa M, de Brito Sanchez G (2020) Black lives matter: revisiting Charles Henry Turner’s experiments on honey bee color vision. Current Biology 30(20): R1235-R1239. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.075

• Baracchi D, Cabirol A, Devaud JM, Haase A, d’Ettorre P, Giurfa M (2020) Pheromone components affect motivation and induce persistent modulation of associative learning and memory in honey bees. Communications Biology 3, 447. doi: 10.1038/s42003-020-01183-x.

• Villar ME, Marchal P, Viola H, Giurfa M (2020) Redefining single-trial memories in the honeybee. Cell Reports 30(8):2603-2613.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.01.086

• Rabinovich Orlandi I, Fullio C, Schroeder MN, Giurfa M, Ballarini F, Moncada D (2020) Behavioral tagging underlies memory reconsolidation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 117 (30) 18029-18036. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2009517117

• Giurfa M (2019) An insect's sense of number. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23(9):720-722. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.06.010

Books

Galizia G, Eisenhardt D & Giurfa M. (eds.) 2012. Honeybee Neurobiology and Behavior. Springer, 509pp.