UCLouvain experts: a new season!

What has been your career path so far?
I graduated in pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut in 2006. I did my first research internship at UCLouvain in 2007 as part of a mobility grant. Following that excellent experience, I became a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences at the Louvain Drug Research Institute. I worked on the role of endocannabinoids in chronic inflammatory bowel diseases. After earning my PhD in 2014, I became an FNRS postdoctoral researcher and did a two-year postdoctorate in Sweden. Back in Belgium in the Bioanalysis and Pharmacology of Bioactive Lipids Group at the Louvain Drug Research Institute, I launched research focused on the resolving properties of endocannabinoids.     

How did you feel when you found out you were becoming a research associate?
Joy for the news and enthusiasm for the next step in the adventure.

What is the ultimate goal of your research?
To identify new therapeutic targets, based on endogenous lipid mediators, in order to promote the resolution of chronic inflammation and pain.

What has been your career path so far?
After defending my thesis at UCLouvain under the supervision of Prof. Xavier Gonze, I did a first postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford in the materials department. During the latter, I was elected Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College. In 2019, I was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, which I conducted in the Materials Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

How did you feel when you found out you had become a research associate?
I had the feeling of achieving a milestone in my career, mixed with a feeling of gratitude towards my mentors, collaborators, colleagues and family who have always helped and supported me.

What is the ultimate goal of your research?
My research will focus on the numerical simulation of new materials in an automated, cost-effective and large-scale manner. My goal is to develop new techniques to make predictive calculations of material properties under real-world conditions in the field of transparent electronics powered by photovoltaic cells. Such an advance would offer transparent tablets, self-powered electronic devices and semi-transparent photovoltaic windows.

What is your background?
After studying bioengineering at Ghent University, I obtained my PhD in biomedical sciences in the laboratory of Prof. Geert Carmeliet at KULeuven in 2013, during which I studied skeletal stem cells and bone regeneration. I continued for two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the same laboratory studying the metabolic regulation of skeletal stem cells. Afterwards, I continued my scientific training at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in the US in the laboratory of Prof. David Scadden, where I carried out research on the metabolic regulation of haematopoietic stem cells and leukaemic cells. Since July 2020, I have been group leader at the de Duve Institute, where we study metabolic regulation and the role of the bone marrow microenvironment in blood cell formation and leukaemia.

How did you feel when you found out you had become a research associate?
I’m delighted to have been selected as a research associate, and really grateful to UCLouvain and the FNRS for believing in my research programme and allowing me to develop it further as an independent researcher.

What is the ultimate goal of your research?
My research goal is to understand how cellular communication via metabolites, an evolutionarily ancient form of cellular crosstalk, regulates blood cell production in the bone marrow. By also characterising how this communication is disrupted in blood malignancies such as leukaemia, we hope to develop new therapeutic strategies.

What is your background?
With a bioengineering degree in hand, I had the chance to extend my skills in multiscale modelling of water transport in soil and plants at UCLouvain and during postdoctoral fellowships at the Jülich Research Center and the University of California Davis. My return ticket to UCLouvain allowed me to develop the concept of plant “hydraulic anatomy”, where molecular biologists and eco-hydrologists meet.

How did you feel when you learned that you had become a research associate?
When I learned that I had been selected as an FNRS research associate, I felt deeply grateful to the people who have supported me over the past years and happy to be able to pursue the exciting profession of a researcher.

What is the ultimate goal of your research?
The ultimate goal of my research is to develop our understanding of soil water acquisition by plant roots, from the cell to the whole plant scale, relying mainly on modelling tools to analyse the experimental observations of my collaborators and to question our conceptualisation of this crucial process for our agriculture and natural ecosystems under drought conditions.

"I am an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University, which I joined in January 2013 after defending a PhD in Linguistics at Stanford University under the supervision of Christopher D. Manning. My research focuses on computational pragmatics and aims to identify the elements that enable the semantic and pragmatic inferences we routinely make.
If someone says to you, 'I don't think the lecture was very clear', you will infer that the lecture was not very clear. However, most information retrieval systems work at the clause level and therefore erroneously extract that the lecture was very clear. My goal is to build more robust language comprehension systems.
So far I have been working on English. At CENTAL, I would like to extend my research to French, reconnect with former colleagues and begin new collaborations!"