Meet the team

I grew up in Algeria and moved to France when I was 13 (Besançon). My passion for biology started in high school thanks to an amazing biology teacher. I then moved to Paris to enter a ‘grande école’ (AGRO-INA-PG). This is when I had the chance to enter to a research lab, first as a summer internship, than for my master.

I did my PhD at the Pasteur Institute in Paris where I studied myogenesis in mouse developing embryos. To dig into the mechanisms of gene regulation operating during development, I decided to change model organism and worked on Drosophila. I moved to Berkeley for my post doc in 2010.

My main post-doctoral finding was that minimal promoter sequences control polymerase pausing, essential for transcriptional coordination operating during gastrulation. I started my own independent group in Montpellier in 2015.

I come from a small village in the south of Italy. After a degree and a PhD in theoretical physics, I decided to move into some more applied fields. First I joined the microscopy core facility at the CNIC (Madrid) working on the development of analysis techniques in the field of the Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy.

Since 2015, I moved to Montpellier and joined the IGMM to develop softwares to perform quantitative analysis on imaging data of transcription in drosophila embryos. I work on statistical tests too, to confirm or reject our working hypothesis and on mathematical modeling with our external collaborators.