2023 – now: Ph.D. student, supervised by Pierre-François Lenne and Raphaël Clement (Lenne team).
2021 – 2023: Master’s Degree in Biology at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon. M2 internship on the physiology of the color change of panther chameleons (Michel Milinkovitch and Athanasia Tzika, LANE lab, Université de Genève). M1 internship on the development of new transgenic tools for studying limb regeneration in the crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis (Michalis Averof lab, IGFL, ENS Lyon).
2019 – 2021: Master’s Degree in Physics at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon. M2 internship on the representation and analysis of temporal complex networks (Rémy Cazabet, LIRIS, Université de Lyon). M1 internship on single-cell migration of fibroblasts (Benjamin Audit, ENS Lyon, and Françoise Argoul, Université de Bordeaux).
2016 – 2019: Bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of Trieste. Bachelor’s thesis on the properties of 2D materials, using Quantum ESPRESSO.
I’m working on the development of feathers on the dorsal skin of bird embryos.
Our focus is on the processes that lead to the establishment of the spatial pattern of the feather primordia, i.e., the cellular aggregates from which the actual feathers will develop in the adult. To investigate this spontaneous pattern emergence, we want to look at the mechanics and the dynamics happening at the level of both the single cells and the whole tissue. Our investigation will include both indirect force inference based on cell shapes and direct force inference through tissue manipulation and mechanical probes in the tissue. Finally, because the pattern of feather primordia has a certain degree of spatial regularity that is species-specific, we are also interested in comparing various bird species with each other.
My project is supervised by Pierre-François Lenne and Raphaël Clement (IBDM) and we work in collaboration with the team of Marie Manceau (Collège de France).