Meet the Team

I studied at the University of Vienna, and I am a trained molecular biologist who turned into a computational biologist early on in the career. I did my PhD at the IMP in Vienna, followed by posts as bioinformatics group leader first at the MPI-CBG in Dresden, the MPI-AGE in Cologne and the MPI of Biochemistry in Martinsried. Since 2016, I am CNRS DR2, and have joined the IBDM as the group leader of the Computational Biology team.
I'm fascinated by mitochondria, and by evolutionary biology, two of the main topics in our research group. 

In my private time, I love cycling in all kinds of terrains, rock climbing, swimming, sewing, reading, and good food (eating, not cooking)!

I am a CNRS researcher. After obtaining a Ph-D in physics at Bordeaux university, working on DNA Origami, I joined Christophe Zimmer Group at pasteur Institute to work on modelling chromosomes in Yeast. Then I went to the ENS of Lyon to study and model DNA replication in Eukaryotes using computer simulation. My main research centers are understanding where DNA replication starts in Eukaryotes, what is the epigenetic background that controls the replication, and also a bit orthogonally, I am working on understanding and developing explainability methods for neural networks.

Galadriel is MdC in Bioinformatics at Aix-Marseille University.

Paulina obtained a CENTURI postdoctoral fellowship, working on single-cell metabolism in glioblastoma and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). 

Ismahene won a CENTURI PhD fellowship with her project on the mechanical stability of proteins. She developed the MechanoPro-DB database, and tries to identify sequence and structural motifs that are implicated in the mechanical stability of proteins. She is currently testing some of these motifs in vitro, using AFM. 

Theo is a PhD fellow from AMU university. He is interested in bacterial predation and develops computational methods to help us analyze data from co-evolution experiments. He also loves metabolic modelling and currently tries to model the metabolic warfare between Myxococcus xanthus and E. coli. He collaborates with our former CENTURI Postdoc, Rikesh Jain, and Tam Mignot from the LCB. 

Mathias obtained a CENTURI PhD fellowship with his project to classify patients based on mitochondrial expression patterns. He is a computer engineer and interested on machine learning. He develops machine learning techniques to classify transcriptomics data and with our collaborator, Ronan Sicre, works on explainability techniques, to understand the inner workings of the deep learning algorithms we use. 

Sam was hired as a PhD student for the ANR grant MitoMetaTis, which we have with Laurent Tichit and Arnaud Mourier (Bordeaux). He is working on integrating multi-omics data using multi-layer networks and on further developing the mitoXplorer web-tool. 

Chaimae works as an engineer with us, helping us with developing the evoMotif database, as well as continuing our development of the mitoXplorer tool. 

Maelle is our second German M2 student this year.  She studies in Potsdam and decided to do her M2 with us here in Marseille. She will also work with Theo on metabolic models of neuronal development in mouse, focusing on data integration methods.