Profile

Bonjour! My name is Anne-Sophie and I come from the beautiful countryside of Jura in the East of France. I went to school there surrounded by nature and there my inspiration for biology slowly but steadily rooted in me. After studying life sciences at the University of Besançon, I moved to Scotland in 2008 to do my final master placement at the University of Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre. Although my master was oriented towards industry, I got hooked by academic research and decided to stay in Edinburgh to pursue my PhD studies.

The focus of my PhD research was to understand the interaction of an oncoprotein and a tumour suppressor protein with the same protein kinase, whose function is to serve as a signal intermediary by attaching phosphoryl groups to other proteins, affecting here the ability of the two first proteins to bind to each other. For this I used human cancer cell lines but soon I got interested in understanding things at a molecular level. That is why I joined EMBL Hamburg for my postdoc to learn how to get access to atomic structures using X-rays. But I am still a cell biologist at heart, so I still play with cells that I use as live test tubes to do functional assays. I very much like science for that ability to try to bring answers to biological questions, but the beauty is that it often raises new questions!