François Bertaux

I am an engineer and mathematician by background, now a quantitative biologist. I find living systems fascinating to study and I believe that their engineering has the potential to transform our health and reduce our environmental impact.

I joined Institut Pasteur and InBio in April 2018. My main area of research and development aims to accelerate the quantitative characterisation of engineered microbial strains by making data generation smarter.

More precisely, I use custom hardware and I develop software to transform bioreactors, cytometers and microscopes into smart experimental platforms enabling online learning or real-time control experiments. I am also interested in extending the capabilities of traditional lab management systems to fully realise the potential of model-driven strain engineering.

I hold an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique and a PhD in applied mathematics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie.

During my  PhD in computational biology at Inria Paris, my main topic was to investigate in-silico the molecular mechanisms behind the resistance of cancer cells to the death ligand TRAIL. To do that, I developped a cell-based (each cell is represented individually) multi-scale (cellular decisions are controlled by biochemical reaction pathways simulated in each cell) approach to model the dynamics of cell populations.

I then moved to Imperial College for a 2.5 years post-doc, where I started to do experiments, investigating physiology of fission yeast at the single-cell level.