photographist

“For me, science is about being curious and amazed at everything, and then, to try to understand why and how it all works! A starting point is to develop the curiosity of a child, and focus it, in order to increase your observation skills, so you can see and be intrigued by every little thing. In my case, it was my mother who sparked my curiosity. Each time we went for a stroll, she would say : “Hey, look!...” and gave me a small explanation… I love to experiment, draw conclusions and develop projects. To my mind, research is the willingness to learn at all times, throughout one’s life. In particular, to learn what you want to learn on your own.
Depending where we are from, where we have been raised or where we live, we have a different point of view on things. Until the age of 17 I lived in Mexico, with a French mother and a Mexican father. I then came to France for my studies. Being bicultural is clearly a great strength!

Sugar is widely known as the small cube that is added to coffee, but sugars are also a broad family of molecules that are found in membranes and biological tissues. At our laboratory, we are interested in sugars from the membranes of some pathogenic parasites. My Ph.D. is about trying to recreate a subset of sugars that are present on the surface of Leishmania (parasites which cause a range of neglected diseases, mainly in tropical areas and that affect certain regions of Africa, India and Brazil).
I try to synthesise these kinds of molecules by means of biotechnological methods, in other words, through the use of living systems. But unfortunately, this is not possible for all my reactions, as we are still far from that ideal in which everything could be synthesised through biotechniques. We still need to use a lot of chemistry to build our molecules.”

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