About my research

I’m a soon-to-be postdoc at the institut Pasteur (Paris), in the GEM team led by Eduardo Rocha. I’ll be working on the methylome of Acinetobacter baumannii, and how it interacts with mobile genetic elements.

I did my PhD (followed by a year as an assistant professor) at Grenoble Alpes University (France), in the TrEE team. My research focused on insertion sequences (IS), which are the simplest type of prokaryotic transposable elements: they only code for a transposase, the enzyme that catalyzes their movement within genomes. I focused on the evolutionary dynamics of these elements and on their interaction with the rest of the genome. More specifically, I adopted genome ecology approaches to study IS distributions, using concepts stemming from ecology to ask new questions about IS biology. For instance, how can we define the ecological niche of an IS element? Are they in competition with each other and with other mobile genetic elements, or do they cooperate? Can we find traces of niche construction or ecological successions in genomes? We recently published an article describing the genomic niche of IS elements (ISME Journal editor’s choice!).

About me

In my spare time, I do amateur photography (you can see a few samples here). I also play the saxophone with the Contrefa’son and I’m an aikidoka.