Methodology: I am trained as an experimental physicist (soft matter), and I work at the interface between biology and physics. Although initially I designed simplified versions of the biological phenomenon of interest (biomimetism), today the approach I prefer is to study biology “in all its complexity”, in a developing organism (embryo, larva, ..) or at a minimum in a multicellular object. I can embed this system in an artificial environment in which I control the stimulus or perturbation delivered. I characterize the effect of the perturbation across different scales (organism, single cell, subcellular) to propose mechanisms of robustness or adaptation that link these scales.
Current questions of interest: Which types of physical interactions can impact peripheral detection in marine invertebrate larvae? How have living organisms elaborated different strategies to cope with fluctuating external temperatures?