Wim Crusio

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Wim E. Crusio (born Wilhelmus Elisabeth Crusio on 20 December 1954) is a Dutch scientist who studies how genes influence behavior and the brain, especially in mice. He works in Talence, France as a research director with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He earned a biology degree, a master's, and a PhD from Radboud University Nijmegen (PhD completed in 1984). His early work looked at how loss of smell affects mice behavior and the genetic basis of exploratory behavior.

Crusio has held positions in Germany, France, and the United States. He did a NATO/Alexander von Humboldt postdoc in Heidelberg (1984–87), spent a year in Paris (1988), returned to Heidelberg as a senior researcher, and then joined CNRS as a researcher, eventually becoming a directeur de recherche. In 2000, he became a full professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, and in 2005 returned to CNRS to lead a group in Talence. He is also adjunct director of the Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives et Intégratives d'Aquitaine.

Crusio’s key work linked the size of certain hippocampal nerve fiber regions in mice to learning performance, suggesting a possible causal relationship. He studied how unpredictable chronic mild stress affects behavior and neurogenesis in mice, with implications for depression, though results varied by strain and sex. He has explored using Fmr1 knockout mice as a model for autism due to Fragile X syndrome. As an editor, he was the founding editor-in-chief of Genes, Brain and Behavior (2001–2011), and has led Behavioral and Brain Functions since 2017 and Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology since 2019. He helped found the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society (IBANGS) in 1996 and received its Distinguished Service Award in 2011. His research has been cited over 10,000 times (h-index around 46).