About me

I am not the classic story: "I knew since I was a kid I would become a scientist" or "I became a scientist because one of my family member had disease X." I am going to tell you my true story. Before I start, I would like to thank both my country, France, that believes that education is a human right and my parents who sacrificed everything they had for me to have a good education.

The reality is: I grew up in a ghetto in south east of France. Born and raised in a small town called La Seyne sur mer. Like most kids from my social cast, I was really into soccer and hip hop. Not at all into science. For my parents, success meant becoming a lawyer or a medical doctor. Since I liked biology, I tried the latter. Med school in France starts with a selection round in the first year. Future doctors are selected not for their capacities to reason about a problem but for their capacities to remember a huge amount of useless informations. I hated it and decided to quit. At the same time I suffered from depression and had to stop my studies for a year. I was lost. Since I liked biology, I decided to apply to a school to become a lab technician. Weirdly, this school "lost" my application package and when I inquired about it they told me I should apply to the biology department next door, at the university of Toulon. I did so and fell in love with cell biology and organic chemistry. My organic chemistry professor had contacts in the oil industry and pushed me to work for Total, but I was more attracted to Biology. I moved to the University of Aix-Marseille, in Luminy, for a Master in Developmental Biology, Immunology and Neurobiology. While neurobiology caught my interest, I fell madly in love with Developmental biology. I was lucky that my university had some of the best Dev Bio labs in the world! I started in the laboratory of Dr. Francoise Helmbacher studying motoneurons in mouse during the summer. This internship was transformative and put the nail in the coffin: I wanted to become a biologist! Francoise is an amazing scientist and taught me extremely precise microdissections. I was spending 16 hours a day in the lab and loving every second of it! During my master I studied muscle development in Christophe Marcelle's lab and ascidians development in Patrick Lemaire's lab. Patrick is the smartest scientist I have ever met and always felt inspired every time we had a meeting. For personal reasons, I wanted to leave the country and applied for a PhD position in Olivier Pourquie's lab in Kansas City, USA, at the Stowers institute for Medical Research. A lot of first time for me: First time on a plane, first time leaving Europe and, since I was starting in January in the Midwest, first time I saw snow! I loved my PhD!! Olivier is not only extremely smart but also a great mentor. In each of our meetings he always asked first what I was thinking about my results and what I thought the next step should be. Of course, he always had ideas on what to do but always asked my opinion first. This helped building my self confidence and I will always be grateful for his mentorship. A year in my PhD, Olivier decided to move the lab to Strasbourg, France. I followed him there and continued my work on the role that the Hox genes are playing in the regulation of vertebrate body axis regulation. I ended up graduating while my paper was under review in Nature thinking it would be accepted soon. I was wrong. After almost 2 years in revision, the paper was rejected for "personal comments of reviewer3 to the editor". Let just say that it really put a big dent in my scientific career. The paper ended up finding a good home in Elife and I am proud of it. After 3 years in Strasbourg, where the sun is as rare as Santa Claus, I needed to go back leaving in a sunny place. Decided to move for a post-doc in Stanford, California, in the laboratory of Maria Barna. There I took on a crazy project: manipulating actin based protrusions, called filopodia, without affecting the actin cytoskeleton. Crazy, right? These filopodia where thought to transport morphogens such as SHH to pattern the vertebrate limb bud. To tackle this question I had to become something else. That wasn't an embryologist problem but a bioengineer problem. Thankfully, I benefited from the mentorship of Zev Bryant in the Bioengineering department at Stanford. Zev is brilliant and I learned a lot from him. I ended up engineering optogenetically controlled myosin motors that can transport actin regulators specifically to the tip of the filopodia to modulate them! While Stanford is an amazing place to do science, my relationship with my advisor was not fruitful so I decided to leave. As you may know, quitting a position when you are on a visa is not an easy decision to take. What would I do? What would I study next? It was a time when cancer immunotherapy was really taking off. The whole change in thinking that cancer was a disease of the immune system instead of focusing on the mutations causing cancer completely changed the way I was thinking about developmental biology and organ regeneration. I started to think: maybe, the lack of regeneration in most mammals is due to a deficiency of the immune system to do its job. I decided to explore this idea by joining the laboratory of Tatjana Piotrowski at the Stowers Institute for Medical research in KC, USA, for a second post-doc where I currently am.