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I am a junior research at Inra Bordeaux-Aquitaine (France), in the UMR1332 Biologie du Fruit et Pathologie laboratory. I like to define myself as a multi-disciplinary scientist, having carried out several systems biology projects on different plant species. After studying green pea and Arabidopsis thaliana, I have now moved to fruit trees.

I study the adaptation of cherry tree to climate change through modelling. I integrate large datasets of climatic, phenotypic and genomic data into a descriptive and predictive model of the phenological stages of cherry tree, with the ultimate aim of selecting the right plant material adapted to future climate conditions with guaranteed fruit quality.

Research overview

After training in agricultural science and plant science, my career began in integrative biology, particularly in modelling the genetic mechanisms of flowering in pea (Pisum sativum). With the aim of contributing to a varietal improvement strategy (already!), I took part in a pluridisciplinary project where I had to interact with specialists in physiology, ecophysiology, genetics, molecular biology and modelling. Flowering is an amazing process, controlled by highly complex mechanisms, but also with a strong impact on crop production, and for this reason, it is a perfect focus for multi-scale modelling.

During this early work, I had the opportunity to appreciate the complexity of the circadian clock, which I could not tackle for lack of data in pea. Therefore, I joined a team associating experimenters and modellers in a very original multidisciplinary context, for the integrated study of the circadian clock in the model plant Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). There, I managed three independent projects using techniques as diverse as molecular biology, imaging, physiology, modelling and involving the management of a large amount of data, interacting strongly with several modellers. In particular, this study led to outstanding observations of spatiotemporal waves of circadian clock gene expression in the leaf.

Career overview

My PhD thesis (December 2005-December 2008), was funded by an Inra ASC contract from the Genetics and Plant Breeding Department. This multidisciplinary project was built in close collaboration between my home laboratory - the Plant Genetics and Plant Improvement Station (UR 254 SGAP, now integrated into the IJPB unit) for the experimental part - and the Centre for Integrative Legume Research (University of Queensland, Australia) for the modelling part.

During my post-doc at the Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology (University of Edinburgh, Great-Britain) from January 2009 to August 2011, I carried out three complementary projects calling on various skills: imaging, image analysis, physiology and modelling. In October 2009, a reorganization of the team led to the creation of several sub-teams. I was appointed to lead the team integrating models at various scales, from molecular to metabolic, into an Arabidopsis development model with the long-term goal of transferring knowledge of the circadian clock to crop plants.

In September 2011, I moved to Bordeaux (France) where I started working on sweet cherry phenology. Again, I realized that very little effort had been made to reach out to other scientific disciplines. Since then, I have initiated new approaches to cherry phenology, from molecular biology to modelling, based on new collaborations. It is surprising how little plant biologists know about fruit trees. I, for one, have always received interested and interesting feedback whenever I gave a presentation on sweet cherry phenology in the context of climate change outside of our “domestic” field of tree genetics.