The community of researchers in the field of neuroscience is considerably saddened by the death of Michael Messaoudi, member of the editorial board of Nutritional Neuroscience. Michael Messaoudi was trained at the University of Nancy, France, Department of Biology, in the fields of ethology and neuroscience. In 1991, he founded ETAP (Éthologie Appliquée, i.e. Applied Ethology), a company based in Nancy and specializing in the behavioral evaluation of drugs and food products.
I first met him as an invited researcher at the University of Nancy in 1993. He was always keen in promoting ethological principles in the evaluation of animal behavior under laboratory conditions. This approach was used in his first publication (Messaoudi et al., Eur J Pharmacol, 1996;299:17–20) concerning rats bar-pressing for light extinction. He continued this type of approach by developing appropriate testing methods in rats and in some cases humans for the behavioral evaluation of milk proteins (Messaoudi et al., Eur J Nutr, 2005;44:128–32; Guesdon et al., Peptides, 2006;27:1476–82; Violle et al., Pharmacol Biochem Behav, 2006;84:517–23), prebiotics and probiotics (Messaoudi et al., Br J Nutr, 2005;93(Suppl 1):S27–30; Rozan et al., Br J Nutr, 2008;100:1192–9; Messaoudi et al., Br J Nutr, 2011;105:755–64; Messaoudi et al., Gut Microbes, 2011;2:256–61), opoids (Wisner et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 2006;103:17979–84; Javelot et al., J Physiol Pharmacol, 2010;61:355–62), cocoa polyphenolic extracts (Rozan et al., J Food Sci, 2007;72:S203–6; Bisson et al., Br J Nutr, 2008;100:94–101; Messaoudi et al., Nutr Neurosci, 2008;11:269–76; Messaoudi et al., Fundam Clin Pharmacol, 2009;23:323–30), sugar replacers (Rozan et al., Br J Nutr, 2008;100:1004–10), antidepressants (Javelot et al., Depress Res Treat, 2011;531435), and omega-3 fatty acids (Wibrand et al., Lipids Health Dis, 2013;12:6).
Michael's main quality was that he was generous-minded, almost always willing to embrace people on first view as friends. He was generous even to people who did not act as friends. He was able to detect flaws in the general thinking patterns of research workers and apply that knowledge. Research workers in the field of nutritional neuroscience will particularly miss his ability to apply ethological principles under laboratory conditions.