Chief Scientific Officer

I was originally trained as a chemist at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris, France), before developing an interest towards biology and biophysics during my master. As a PhD student, I worked at the crossroad between nanotechnology, cell biology and biophysics. I developed one of the first methods for the stimulation of intracellular signals with good spatio-temporal resolution inside living cells, by using bio-functional magnetic nanoparticles. I also developed multiple applications for fluorescent nano-particles to be used as tracers in the cell interior, unveiling the physical and chemical nature of the cytoplasm. As a joined postdoc in the laboratories of Ali Brivanlou and Eric Siggia, I was involved in the creation of self-organized human embryonic stem cell (hESC) assemblies mimicking early human embryos at gastrulation stages. This represented one of the few successful attempts to reproduce in the dish a key developmental step based on hESC with a very quantitative platform, where hundreds of synthetic embryos can be imaged and analyzed to understand the molecular mechanisms patterning the early embryo. I was then able to dissect the underlying mechanism of self-organization, using genome edited lines, and to reduce its complexity to two key factors that combine structural elements at the tissue level and diffusion of morphogens and inhibitors as hypothesized by Alan Turing a century ago. At the end of my postdoc, I was recruited to start a junior research group at the Curie Institute and won the French national competition to become a CNRS permanent researcher. Few months later I decided to quit this job in France to join RUMI scientific, spin-off from the Brivanlou lab, as a chief scientific officer. My first contribution in RUMI is to develop hESC-based tissue- scale models for Huntington Disease that can be used for drug discovery and to implement Machine-learning based analytical tools. This has resulted in the discovery of a new target for HD which we are developing internally. I have then led platform expansion in autism and I am leading an ongoing collaboration with the Seaver center at Mt Sinai, a renowned center for the basic and clinical study of autism, and further developing the platform for drug discovery in nephrology and respiratory viruses.