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Meet the scientific committee
Anabela Bensimon-Brito
CBI Toulouse
Anabela Bensimon-Brito is a new principal investigator at Centre for Integrative Biology (CBI) Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCD), in France. In 2016 she joined Didier Stainier's Lab for a postdoctoral project at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research (Germany) to establish a new model for cardiac valve regeneration. In 2021 she started her own lab thanks to the ATIP-Avenir Program and an ERC Starting Grant to study new mechanisms of cardiovascular disease and regeneration in zebrafish.
Julie Batut,
CBI MCD Toulouse
Research Director, Head of the Multimodal Modelling of Organ Development team, CBI MCD, Toulouse, Coordinator of the Femmes & Sciences CBI PhD Programme mentoring programme. Julie Batut joined the CNRS in 2008 as a researcher in Developmental Biology. Since 2023, she has led a multidisciplinary research team at the Toulouse Centre for Integrative Biology, using mathematical modelling, zebrafish embryo, imaging and data learning to understand organ formation.
She is a research director at the CNRS, an embryologist and expert in neurogenesis and the acquisition of cell shape during embryonic development. She is developing a multidisciplinary collaborative project (mathematics, computer science, image analysis & engineering to understand living organisms). Her project focuses on understanding the mechanisms involved in organ formation. It is particularly interested in the olfactory sensory organ in the zebrafish embryo. She is deeply committed to developing and transmitting inclusive, multidisciplinary science. In conjunction with her scientific career, she is extremely committed to promoting research and the place of women scientists via Femmes & Sciences, Les Chemins Buissonniers and Les Maths en Scène. Since 2017, she has been coordinating the mentoring programme for female PhD students in Toulouse with the Femmes & Sciences association and the CBI phD programme. This programme involves 30 mentor-mentee pairs each year.
https://www.femmesetsciences.fr/mentorat
She is a research director at the CNRS, an embryologist and expert in neurogenesis and the acquisition of cell shape during embryonic development. She is developing a multidisciplinary collaborative project (mathematics, computer science, image analysis & engineering to understand living organisms). Her project focuses on understanding the mechanisms involved in organ formation. It is particularly interested in the olfactory sensory organ in the zebrafish embryo. She is deeply committed to developing and transmitting inclusive, multidisciplinary science. In conjunction with her scientific career, she is extremely committed to promoting research and the place of women scientists via Femmes & Sciences, Les Chemins Buissonniers and Les Maths en Scène. Since 2017, she has been coordinating the mentoring programme for female PhD students in Toulouse with the Femmes & Sciences association and the CBI phD programme. This programme involves 30 mentor-mentee pairs each year.
https://www.femmesetsciences.fr/mentorat
Pascale Dufourcq,
Université de Toulouse
Pascale Dufourcq is currently Professor of Developmental Biology at the University of Toulouse, Co-Head of the Master Program on Integrated Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms (M2CI), and has been a faculty member and researcher since 2003.
Guy Malkinson,
Université de Lorraine
Dr Malkinson, Inserm Principal Investigator, works on Acute and Chronic Cardiovascular Deficiency (DCAC) at Université de Lorraine, France
Marion Delous,
CRNL Lyon
Marion Delous is expert in human genetics, modelling neurodevelopmental diseases associated to minor splicing deficiency in zebrafish.
Benjamin Delprat,
Inserm, MMDN-ZEFIX Montpellier
Benjamin Delprat is an Inserm Research Director. He is working on Wolfram syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder in the MMDN in Montpellier. He demonstrated that the pathology is linked to a deficit in the communication between the endoplasmic reticulum and the mitochondria, in a peculiar structure called the mitochondria-associated ER membrane or MAMs. He developed several zebrafish models of the pathology and showed that activation of the sigma-1 receptor, an ER chaperone of the MAM, is able to alleviate the cellular and behavioral deficits. In parallel, he developed zebrafish models for other rare disease, such as Retinitis Pigmentosa, to identify altered signaling pathways.
Laure Bally Cuif,
Institut Pasteur, Paris
Laure Bally-Cuif is a CNRS research director and group leader at Institut Pasteur. Her lab studies the molecular, cellular and spatial control of neurogenesis in the vertebrate brain, using as main model the adult zebrafish telencephalon and a combination of functional genetics, dynamic imaging and modeling.
Stéphanie Bertrand
Observatoire Océanologique Banyuls
Stéphanie Bertrand is an associate professor at Sorbonne University and works at the Banyuls/Mer marine station. Her research focuses on the evolution of developmental mechanisms. She uses the amphioxus, a cephalochordate, as an animal model to understand how morphological traits have evolved in the chordate group and how novelties specific to vertebrates have emerged.
Jean-Pierre Levraud
NeuroPsy & TEFOR, Paris
Jean-Pierre Levraud got his PhD in immunology. He is Research director at Institut Pasteur, where he has pioneered the use of zebrafish to study host-virus interactions. He is now seconded to the Paris-Saclay Neuroscience Institute, where his team studies neuroinvasive viruses and neuro-immunology. He is also the head of TEFOR Paris-Saclay, a service Unit that offers genome editing and phenotyping of zebrafish.
Marion Coolen
Institut Imagine, Paris
Marion Coolen is an INSERM investigator in the Developmental Brain Disorders laboratory at the Imagine Institute in Paris. Her work aims to unravel the pathological mechanisms driving neurodevelopmental disorders that impact the cerebellum and brainstem. To achieve this, she employs a combination of functional approaches using zebrafish and human brain organoid models.
Nicolas David,
Ecole Polytechnique
Nicolas David leads a research group at the Laboratory for Optics and Biosciences, École Polytechnique. His work focuses on how cell migrations are guided and within the early zebrafish embryo to ensure proper morphogenesis.
Shahad Albadri,
Institut de la Vision
Shahad Albadri’s research focuses on elucidating how redox-regulated signaling networks control and influence the differentiation of retinal stem and progenitor cells. She investigates these mechanisms using both zebrafish models and human iPSC-derived retinal organoids, which serve as in vitro systems to model human retinogenesis. Over the past decade, she has also made significant contributions to the development of CRISPR-based gene editing strategies in zebrafish, enabling the generation of knockout, knockin, and disease models. These tools have allowed her to uncover key aspects of visual system development and function.
Miguel Godinho Ferreira,
IRCAN, Nice
Miguel Godinho Ferreira has expertise in telomere biology, aging, and cancer in zebrafish. A group leader at the instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal, since 2006, where he established the telomerase mutant zebrafish as a model of premature aging. Since 2017 as a DR CNRS at the IRCAN, France, his current research focuses on how organ communication promotes organismal aging through cGAS-STING/IFN inflammation.
Elise CAU,
Université de Toulouse
Dr Elise Cau's scientific life has been devoted to understand how sensory cells are generated and how this contributes to behavior. Currently, she is exploring the regulation of a wide range of biological functions by the circadian system.
Her most recent project unravels how the circadian clock controls the specification of sensory cells of the pineal gland and how the pineal gland contributes to the circadian rhythms of locomotion in the diurnal zebrafish.
Her most recent project unravels how the circadian clock controls the specification of sensory cells of the pineal gland and how the pineal gland contributes to the circadian rhythms of locomotion in the diurnal zebrafish.
Joao Cardeira da Silva,
RESTORE Toulouse
João Cardeira da Silva is an ATIP-Avenir group leader at the RESTORE Institute in Toulouse, where he investigates how the immune response, particularly adaptive immunity, influences organ regeneration and damage across life stages, using regenerative and aging zebrafish models. He completed his PhD at the University of Algarve, studying mechanisms of bone regeneration, and conducted his postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, focusing on the immune regulation of cardiac regeneration.
Florence Ruggiero, ENS Lyon
Florence Ruggiero is a CNRS director of research and group leader at the Institute of Functional Genomics of Lyon (IGFL), part of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Her research focuses on extracellular matrix biology. Using zebrafish combined to functional genomics and advanced imaging, her lab investigates how matrix dynamics drive tissue formation, regeneration, and how their disruption leads to disease.
Jean-Philippe Pradere,
RESTORE, Toulouse
Jean-Philippe Pradere is working in metabolism and aging with recognized expertise in the study of mitochondria and their central role in these processes, using mouse and fish models. In 2019, he set up at RESTORE Institute, the first French colony of Nothobranchius furzeri, a fish considered to be the vertebrate with the shortest lifespan in captivity (4 to 6 months), which now constitute a strategic asset for the research conducted within the IHU HealthAge.
Georges Debregeas, Sorbonne University
Georges Debrégeas is Research Director at CNRS, currently working at the Laboratoire Jean Perrin (Sorbonne University, Paris). Trained as an experimental physicist, he has focused for the past 20 years on Neuroscience. His group combines quantitative behavior, neuroimaging, and computational approaches to study sensorimotor processes in zebrafish and, more recently, in Danionella cerebrum.
Pedro Hernandez-Cerda,
Institut Curie, Paris
Pedro Hernández is a developmental biologist and immunologist who trained in zebrafish developmental biology in Chile, completed a PhD in gut immunology in Freiburg, Germany, using mouse models, and a postdoc at Institut Pasteur, Paris, on zebrafish gut immunity. Since October 2019 he has led a lab in the Developmental Biology Department at Institut Curie, studying how immune-microbiota interactions shape gut development, early life physiology, and regeneration using zebrafish.
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