Christian Lüscher (born April 13, 1963) is a Swiss neurobiologist and full professor at the Department of Basic Neurosciences of the University of Geneva.
[2] Lüscher is known for his contributions in the field addiction, particularly for establishing links of causality between the drug-evoked synaptic plasticity and adaptive behavior in mice.
After clinical residencies at the Inselspital in Bern and the University Hospital in Geneva, he left for a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF (Advisor Roger Nicoll).
He returned to University of Geneva with a career development award of the Swiss National Science Foundation,[4] where he first became associated (2003) and then full professor (2009)[5] Lüscher studies how addictive drugs alter synaptic transmission in the reward system of the mouse brain.
He has observed that suppression of activity of D1 receptor expression medium spiny neurons that project to the lateral hypothalamus (LH) authorizes food intake.