Profile

I’m a French Scientists who came to London to study and stayed as a professional researcher after my PhD. I live with my boyfriend who is a researcher in Economics. I’d love to have a dog but my house is too small for it, so I just enjoy visiting my parent’s dog in Paris. We are a family of scientists and health professionals, so my dog’s name is Darwin (like Charles Darwin, the British scientist who described the concepts of Evolution!). In my first years at University, back in Paris, he was always studying with me (more like sleeping on my feet while I was at my desk admittedly… but a great support anyways).

In my spare time, I like to read, bake, crochet amigurumi, do yoga and meet friends all around London but also all around the world. Science is a great way to make a lot of international friends and gives you great reasons to go visit them everywhere they are.
I can recite every single episode of Friends by heart, it is actually by watching them over and over again that I learned English faster than the other kids at school. I’m also a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teenage Ninja Turtles and Dragon Ball. I used to play video games a lot when I was at school and could still beat pretty much anyone at Mario Kart.

Neuroscience studies the normal functions of the brain, spinal cord and nerves and the way diseases affect these in order to find cures. My research tries to understand the causes of ‘motor neuron diseases’ that are the diseases that affect the nerve cells which link the brain to the muscles to send signals for movement, also called ‘motor neurons’.

For example: when you want to move your hand to grab a glass on the table, your brain needs to send the signal “grab the glass” to your hand and your hand muscles will move to allow you to grab the glass. This signal is sent from your brain to your hand by a cable or ‘nerve’ a little bit like electricity goes from the wall to a lamp. In the diseases I study, the cable or ‘motor neuron’ dies and the signal cannot be sent anymore, which makes some people unable to move as they want to.

To research these diseases in the laboratory, I build small circuits made of these nerve cells or ‘motor neurons’ and tiny muscles in a microscopic dish. I then use a lot of imaging processes to compare motor neurons from patients with the disease to motor neurons from healthy individuals in the microscopic circuits. These are then used to test drugs to heal the cells in the dish, which can then be tested on humans to cure the disease. One way of seeing whether the drug works on the cells is to use colourful markers which makes most of my work days feel like looking at fireworks. I’ve attached an image of some of my cells for you to see how pretty it can be.