Marie-Germaine Bousser

Bousser graduated from Paris-Sorbonne University in neuro-psychiatry in 1972 with her thesis devoted to the prevention of cortical artery thrombosis in rabbits by aspirin and PGE1.[1]

She trained at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.[1][2] Subsequently, she worked at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, before returning to Paris.[1] She became a Professor of Neurology at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in 1981.[1] She became head of neurology at the Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris in 1989, where she stayed until 1997.[1][2] She returned to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in 1997, becoming the head of neurology there. She later became Emeritus Professor at the Paris-Diderot University.[1]

Bousser is most well known for her role in the discovery of CADASIL, a hereditary form of stroke.[3] She researched the, then unnamed, condition for the first time in 1976, when a patient entered her clinic with signs of Binswanger's disease after suffering a stroke.[4] She found that the condition was hereditary after children of the initial patient presented similar symptoms. In 1993 she showed, together with Elisabeth Tournier-Lasserve, that the condition was caused by a mutation on chromosome 19.[4] They subsequently named the condition CADASIL.[4][1]

Bousser is Commander of the Legion of Honor (2013) and Grand Officer of the Order of Merit (2018)[1]

• 2008 Johann Jakob Wepfer Prize[4][3]
• 2012 World Stroke Organisation President's Award[5]
• 2019 Brain Prize[1]