Background

After finishing his degree in zoology (1971), Jacques Balthazart immediately became interested in the subject that was to mark out his entire career as a researcher: the endocrinology of behaviour. His work, which is focused on the control of reproductive behaviour, is almost exclusively based on avian models.

After obtaining a PhD in zoological science from the University of Liège in 1977, Jacques Balthazart spent a year at the Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. In the United States, his studies focused on the Barbary dove or Ring dove. When he returned to Liège in 1979, he turned his attention to the Japanese quail, and later, within the framework of another line of research on the control of song and nervous plasticity in songbirds, to the canary and the zebra finch.

His return from the United States also coincided with a certain change of direction or, more exactly, a change in continuity. He left behind the endocrinology of behaviour for the neuroendocrinology of behaviour. “I went to the brain after having begun on the periphery”, he says.

Now head of the Behavioural Neuroendocrinology Research Group at the University of Liège, Jacques Balthazart is the author of some 350 scientific articles. Furthermore, in 1983, he created, at the European level, a cycle of conferences on the theme of Hormones, brain and behaviour, and has directed the publication of their proceedings. He was also elected president, from 2003 to 2005, of the Society for Behavioural Neuroendocrinology and is currently co-editor-in-chief of the review Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology.