I am interested in the pathophysiology of the adult osteoarticular system and in particular osteoporosis and osteoarthritis. I investigate how bone and cartilage are impacted by metabolic factors and mechanical input, as well as by inter-organ communication. With students, post-docs, permanent staff and national/international collaborators, we make use of various model systems and approaches to:

– gain insight into how mechanical unloading induces the bone loss observed in microgravity conditions in space; we analyse its kinetics, relationship to concurrent changes in the muscular and cardio-vascular systems and its cellular and molecular basis; we also explore possible countermeasures to bone loss

– understand the influence of mechanical load and obesity on myeloma bone disease

– assess the impact of the enterokine FGF19 on osteo-sarcopenia, the parallel loss of muscle and bone function observed in the elderly, in several pathologies (ex. CKD, cancer) or in bed-stricken individuals

– dissect the cellular and molecular mechanisms of how the ketogenic diet impacts the progression of obesity-compounded osteoarthritis

We employ in vivo and in vitro models (murine models, cell cultures), but also samples and data from astronauts, healthy volunteers in microgravity analogues on Earth and cohorts.

Research funded by ANR, SFR, UJM, local charities, CNES, ESA and NASA

I am the coordinator of the first year of the master’s in Biomedical Sciences/Bioengineering at the faculty of medicine of the University of Saint-Etienne (M1 i-Santé). I teach physiology and stem cells & organoids to year 1 master students. I also teach mechanobiology of development to year 2 master students, developmental biology to bachelor students in Biomedical Sciences (Science pour la Santé, SPS) and an elective course on Microbiota and Health to 4^th and 5^th year medical students.

In addition, I am the coordinator for international exchanges and programmes in the Department of Bioengineering for Health (Bio Ingénierie en Santé) at our faculty. I sit in the Council of the Doctoral School Sciences, Engineering and Health (Science Ingénierie Santé, ED 488 SIS) as well as on the committee for the attractiveness of the medical research career on our medical campus.

I trained as a developmental biologist and neuroscientist at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, with short internships at MIT, Boston (A.D. Lander) and KU Leuven, Belgium (D. Huylebroek) and a long internship with Edoardo Boncinelli in Milan. My PhD with Stephen Cohen at EMBL-Heidelberg, Germany, focussed on developmental genetics and addressed fundamental questions on morphogen function. I kept on using Drosophila as a system to dissect the molecular code of axon pathfinding (as a postdoc with Mike Bate at Cambridge) and the complex tissue and cell biology of morphogenesis and maturation of the respiratory system (as a postdoc with Domna Karagogeos and then permanent staff scientist, Heraklion, Greece). Having relocated to France with the family, I moved to more physiological questions, investigating how the gut microbiota impacts the intestinal epithelium and organismal growth under poor nutritional conditions, with François Leulier at IGFL, Lyon. After years researching how tissues, organs and organ systems assemble and mature and how this can be impacted by diet and the microbiota, at the end of 2016 I joined SAINBIOSE and became Associate Professor at the University of Saint-Etienne and my research switched to the pathophysiology of the adult osteoarticular system under metabolic and mechanical stress.

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