Full professor
Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Faculty of Medicine

Frederic Bretzner is a full professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval, and a researcher in the Neurosciences program at the CHU de Québec-Université Laval Research Center. He completed his PhD at Université de Montréal (Québec), focusing on the plasticity of the motor cortex after peripheral nerve injury, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (British Columbia), where he studied the plasticity of the red nucleus after spinal cord injury. He then undertook a second postdoctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University in Halifax (Nova Scotia), investigating the role of brainstem neurons in motor control.

He has been awarded three FRQS scholarships (2012–2024) and the Turnbull-Tator Award for spinal cord injury research (2013 and 2023), which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of spinal cord and brain injury research. Since 2012, he has led a research team specializing in the neural control of movement and locomotion in both physiological and neuropathological settings at the Centre de recherche du CHU de Québec-Université Laval.

Using transgenic and mutant mice, his research group has developed tools to assess changes in locomotor gaits following genetic mutations, spinal cord injury, and neuromodulation aimed at enhancing motor recovery. By combining kinematics, electrophysiological recordings, and genetic tools accessible in the mouse model, his team has recently characterized the functional contributions of genetically identified neuronal subpopulations in the brainstem to locomotor control and recovery from spinal cord injury. These findings have been published in leading journals such as Journal of Neuroscience, PLoS Biology, Current Biology, Cell Reports Medicine, and Nature Communications.

The results of these studies have the potential to improve functional recovery following neurotraumatic injuries or neurodegenerative diseases affecting motor control and locomotion.