Grégoire Courtine was originally trained in Mathematics and Physics, but received his PhD degree in Experimental Medicine from the University of Pavia, Italy, and the French Institute of health, INSERM, in 2003. From 2004-2007, he held a Post-doctoral Fellow position at the Brain Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Dr Reggie Edgerton, and was a research associate for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (CDRF). In 2008, he became Assistant Professor at the faculty of Medicine of the University of Zurich, where he established his own research laboratory. In 2012, he was nominated Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) where he holds the International paraplegic foundation (IRP) chair in spinal cord repair at the Center for Neuroprosthetics and the Brain Mind Institute. He has published several articles proposing radically new approaches for restoring function after spinal cord injury, which have been discussed extensively in national and international media. He has received numerous honours and awards including the 2007 UCLA Chancellor’s award for excellence in post-doctoral research and the 2009 Schellenberg Prize for his innovative research in spinal cord injury, awarded by the International Foundation of Research in Paraplegia.