Director of Research at INSERM

Dr. Antoine Lutz is a director of research at the French Medical Research Institute (INSERM) in the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CNRL). He did his PhD in cognitive neurosciences in Paris, France, with Francisco Varela on the first-person dimension of attention.

During his postdoctoral work with Richard Davidson, at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, he pioneered the neuroimaging study of meditation practices in expert meditators and in novices who learnt to meditate using the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR).

MBSR is a secular meditation intervention routinely used in hospitals in the North-America and Europe.

In 2008, Richard Davidson and him were awarded a NIH-NCCAM grant to fund in Madison the first American Center of Excellence on Research dedicated to neurophysiological study of meditation practices.

After working for ten years in the US as a research scientist, he joined the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France in January 2013.

current research group focuses on investigating the neurophysiological basis of mindfulness and compassion meditations and their impact on consciousness, attention and emotion regulations, and pain perception as measured by cognitive, affective and social neuroimaging paradigms using EEG, MEG, intra-cortical EEG, and fMRI. This research is currently funded by an European ERC consolidator grant (Brain&Mindfulness, 2014-2019).

He also collaborates to a European research consortium investigating the impacts of meditation practices on ageing and well-being as measured by brain imaging (PET, IRMf, DTI, EEG), biomarkers of ageing, and psycho-affective and cognitive behavioural measures (Meditageing, H2020, 2016-2021, study coordinated by Gaël Chételat, INSERM Caen). He recently started a collaboration investigating the neurocomputational principles of meditation (ANR MindMadeClear, coordinated by Hugues Mounier, CNRS, Supélec, Paris).

Discover ISERM’s website here.