François Rousset - Group Leader
François did his PhD in David Bikard's lab at Institut Pasteur where he developed CRISPR-based methods to probe microbial gene function. He then joined Rotem Sorek's lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science for his postdoc where he focused on the molecular mechanisms and evolution of bacterial defenses against phages. François obtained a CNRS position and joined CIRI in 2024 to open a new research group on microbial genomics and bacterial immunity.
Kevin Barthes - PhD student
Kevin obtained a Bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Bordeaux and a Master's degree in Biotechnology from the Strasbourg Graduate School of Biotechnology. After a research stay at New England Biolabs (Ipswich) and CIRI (Lyon), Kevin Barthes obtained a doctoral fellowship to join the Microbial Molecular Genomics lab in October 2024. During his PhD, Kevin will develop novel approaches to investigate gene function in phage genomes.
Julie Baltenneck - Engineer
Julie obtained a Bachelor's degree in Genetics and a Master's degree in Microbial Pathogenesis from the Claude Bernard University of Lyon. After three years working on bacterial functional genomics in the Microbiology, Adaptation and Pathogenesis Lab of INSA Lyon, Julie joined CIRI in October 2024 to accelerate our projects on microbial genomics and bacterial immunity.
Aya Fellah - Master student
Aya is a last-year student in Bioinformatics at the Mohamed VI University of Health Sciences in Casablanca. In our lab, she develops comparative analyses of viral genomes to investigate anti-defense genes.
Virginie Borges Cardoso - Engineer
Virginie obtained a Master's degree in Human Pathology and a Master's degree in Infectiology, after which she worked for five years on Lassa virus in the BSL4 laboratory of CIRI/Institut Pasteur in Lyon. Virginie is now a joint engineer between our lab and Lucie Etienne's lab (CIRI) to investigate the evolutionary conservation of innate immunity from bacteria to human.