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.

Born and raised near Marseille, France, and allegedly the nerd of the lab; I’m mainly interested in enhancing the technical aspects of our experiments.

Having always been passionate about genetics, I quickly turned to Drosophila in order to satisfy my thirst for science. After a PhD and post-doc focusing on gene regulation by small RNAs I decided to join the team in order to be able to visualise gene regulation within a live context, still using Drosophila and genetics tools. My vision of science is highly influence by two major scientists; Francois Rabelais and Karl Popper.

I grew up in Colombia where I started my studies at the medical school (UCC University). I then moved to Paris where I continued my studies in the science field at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), obtaining my MSCs in stem cells and developmental biology. From here I decided to start a PhD on transcription because I am really interested in understanding how gene expression is controlled in space and time in the context of a multicelular organism.

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.