Dr. Francois Gonon began his research career as an engineer in the INSERM unit lead by Prof. Michel Jouvet. He designed a carbon fiber electrode and new voltammetric techniques for monitoring dopamine in the rodent brain. With these new tools, Dr. Gonon and coworkers published seminal studies regarding the release and reuptake of dopamine. He was the first to give an estimate of the dopamine concentration in the extracellular fluid and to show that this concentration is entirely due to dopamine released by impulse flow in a non-linear way. He obtained his PhD thesis in 1984. More recently, Dr. Gonon studied the effects of dopamine on the discharge activity of target neurons in the rat striatum. His most recent study points out the inhibitory role of GABA interneurons on the discharge activity of striatal output neurons.