Composition d'équipe

LAB members

• Daniel Jost (DR2 CNRS, PI)

Daniel obtained his PhD in Physics in 2010 from ENS de Lyon for his research on statistical physics of folding and melting of nucleic acids under the supervision of R. Everaers at the Physics lab of ENS de Lyon. For his first post-doc, he joined the laboratory of E. Levine at Harvard University to study small RNA-mediated post-transcriptional regulation aka RNAi. In 2012, he returned to France at the Physics lab of ENS de Lyon as an fixed-term lecturer and started to investigate the role of epigenomics in the spatial organization of chromatin in collaboration with C. Vaillant. He obtained a CNRS permanent research position (Research Associate) in 2014 at the TIMC Institute (Univ Grenoble-Alpes) in the Mathematical and Computational Biology team where he continued working on chromatin organization and regulation. In 2019, he moved back to ENS de Lyon at LBMC as a team leader to integrate his biophysical research activity within a biology institute and to develop new projects on the structure-function relation of chromatin. In 2020, he was recipient of the CNRS Bronze Medal for his early career achievements. In 2022, he was promoted Senior Researcher (DR) by CNRS. Latest CV can be found here.

Bluesky: @djost-physbiol.bsky.social

• Geneviève Fourel (DR2 INSERM, Researcher)

Genevieve is a research director at INSERM since 2001, and presently a PI hosted by Daniel Jost's team. She's been obsessed with understanding gene regulation from A to Z ever since the beginning of her career in Jerry Crabtree's laboratory in 1986, where she was the lucky one who discovered the first tissue-specific transcription factor, HNF1A. She's also interested in understanding gene deregulation in disease, in particular in cancer, which is the other side of the same coin and is instrumental in grasping mechanisms in the healthy state. Over the years, this took her through each layer of genome organization, where she contributed to define basic rules, and she eventually tackled the subject globally with a special attention to the largely neglected repeat sequences. She received awards from the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM), from the Ligue contre le Cancer, and from the National Academy of Science for her innovative approaches to cancer.

• Laurent Modolo (IRCN CNRS, Engineer)

Laurent obtained his PhD in biology in 2014 from the Lyon 1 University for his research bioinformatics and statistics methods for the study of genetic horizontal transfers, small RNAs and the dynamics of transposable elements under the supervision of Emmanuel Lera in the LBBE. After a small contract on the development of galaxy pipeline, he joined the Frisén Lab at Karolinska Institutet and the High Dimensional Statistics for Genomics group at the LBBE for his Post-Doc on the analysis of single-cell RNA dans DNA sequencing data under the supervision of Jeff Mold and Franck Picard. Since 2017 Laurent is coordinator of the Biocomputing Hub where he worked on various projects involving the analysis of omics data. Since 2023, he joined, part-time, the Physical Biology of Chromatin lab to work on the calibration of Hi-C data.

• Valérie Robert (CRHC INSERM, Researcher)

Valérie obtained her PhD in Molecular Genetics in 2000 from University Versailles-Saint-Quentin for her work on Flamenco, a genomic region located at the pericentromere of the X-chromosome of D. Melanogaster and involved in the repression of the retrovirus Gypsy, under the supervision of A. Pélisson. For her first post-doc, she joined the group of R. Plasterk ( Hubrecht Laboratory, Utrecht, NED) where she performed a whole-genome RNAi screen to identify genes involved in co-suppression in the C. elegans germline. For her second post-doc, she joined the group of JL Bessereau at IBENS (ENS Paris) and established MosTIC, a pre-CRISPR area technique, to engineer the C. elegans genome. She was hired at INSERM as a Research Associate in 2007 and moved to LBMC in 2010 to join the group of F. Palladino and work on the chromatin struture and function in the C. elegans germline. In 2026, she joined the ChromaTeam group to study how genes are expressed and organized in space and time influences the apparition of mutations. 

• Nicolas Pellet (PhD student)

Nicolas received his Bachelor (Physics) and Master of Science (Fundamental Physics) from the University of Toulouse. Then, he went on to do a second Master's degree at Paris University on complex fluids and studied the biophysics of type 4 pili at Laboratoire Jean Perrin with Nicolas Biais. He joined the LBMC as a PhD student in September 2023, under the supervision of D. Jost. He is studying the biophysics of condensin-mediated loop extrusion on chromatin.

• Léo Tarbouriech (PhD student)

Léo did his academic curriculum at ENS Paris-Saclay and his master degree at Master of Physics of Complex Systems (Université Paris Saclay). He is mostly interrested by applications of statistical physics and complex system theory to biological problems. His PhD project, cosupervised by D. Jost (LBMC) and C. Vaillant (LPENSL), relates to the computation of loop probability in chromatin and to the inference of mechanical properties of chromatin from optogenetic experiments, in collaboration with the Yvert team (LBMC). LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/leo-tarbouriech-6b6a05227.

• César Lopez Pastrana (Postdoc)

César earned his PhD in Biophysics at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (Madrid, Spain) in 2017, under the supervision of Fernando Moreno Herrero. During his doctoral period, he used single-molecule techniques (magnetic tweezers) to investigate DNA-protein interactions. Following this, César joined the group of Ulrich Gerland at the Technische Universität München (Munich, Germany), where he applied coarse-grained computational methods to study the mechanical properties of shells and membranes. In June 2025, César joined the group to study the biophysics of nuclear mechanotransduction. For more details, visit his webpage.

• Samir Bertache (PhD-student)

Samir obtained his Bachelor's degree in Cellular Biology in Saint-Étienne, followed by a Master's degree in Bioinformatics at Université Clermont Auvergne. He joined the team for his Master's internship before continuing as a PhD student under the supervision of Daniel Jost and Laurent Modolo. His research focuses on developing computational and statistical methods to improve the analysis of Hi-C and related data, with a particular focus on understanding and correcting experimental biases.

• Davide Erba (Postdoc)

Davide obtained his PhD in Health and Biology at the Centre de Biologie Structural in Montpellier in November 2019. In his doctorate, he performed molecular dynamics simulations to study conformational dynamics of RNA-binding proteins and protein-RNA condensates. Afterward, he has joined the group of Daniel Jost within the PEPR Cell-ID project, in which he applies biophysical models to analyze DNA-FISH measurements and performs Monte Carlo simulations to study the condensation properties of chromatin.

• Gaurik Mukherjee (PhD-student)

Lab Alumni

Chloé Marché (L3 Biology, ENS de Lyon, 2026)

Nicolas Anglade (L3 Informatics, ENS de Lyon, 2026)

Elham Ghobadpour (Postdoc, 2025-2026)

Paul-Swann Puel (PhD student, 2024-2026)

Eva Feuilloy (L2 Biology, ENS de Lyon, 2025)

Dario D'Asaro (PhD student & Postdoc, 2020-2025)

Oliver Gittus (Postdoc, 2023-2024)

Gabriel Jimenez (Postdoc, 2022-2025)

Jean-Michel Arbona (CR CNRS, 2019-2024)

Myriam Bontonou (Postdoc, 2021-2024)

Hossein Salari (Postdoc, 2019-2024)

Amith Zafal Abdulla (PhD Student & Postdoc, 2020-2023)

Amir Zeraati (PhD Student, 2021-2022)

Maxime Tortora (Postdoc, 2019-2022)

Nathan Lecouvreur (M2 GenoPath, Lyon 1, 2022)

Suzon Montmartin & Zacharia Tougui (M1 Bioinformatics, Lyon 1, 2022)

Eliane Cassassa (M1 MSIAM, ENSIMAG, 2021)

Audrey Piraud (L3 Polytech Nice Sofia, 2021)

Noémie Quesnel (IE, 2021-2022)

Thomas Boukéké-Lesplulier (L3 Biology, ENS de Lyon, 2020)

MISCELLANEOUS