Pierre Bongrand becomes officially Emeritus professor of AMU and Olivier Theodoly becomes the director of LAI. The goal is to pursue the original activity of the LAI on quantitative biophysics and transfer to medicine, and to foster further the scientific dynamics within the unit.

Laurene Aoun, Xuan Luo and Olivier Theodoly sailed off from Marseille to participate to the CNRS summer School on active matter.  They crossed whales on the way but unlike Jonas, they didn’t need their help to safely reach the harbour 3 days later. Nice conference to the LAI sailors.

The LAI will be happy to benefit from the great experience of its historical founder for the next quinquennial. Congratulations, Pierre.

Jeremie Kerbrat is here for 2 months, with Pierre-Henri and Laurent Limozin.

Marie-Julie DEJARDIN is doing her Master 2 internship for 6 months, in the frame of the Nice University Imaging Program. She is financially supported by GDR MIV and will work on imaging APC lamellipods with combined AFM and interferometry under the direction of Pierre-Henri Puech and Laurent Limozin.

This project intends to perform quantitative analysis of some essential steps of the leukocyte recruitment cascade using in vitro tools developed at LAI based on microfluidics and protein patterning. The in vitro approach will be based on and compared with in vivo models of T cell traffic in lymph node, T cell response to infection by Bordetella pertussis, and T cell properties of patients with multiple sclerosis. This project is a LAI collaboration with Alveole company (Luc Talini, Romuald Valy), Vincent Studer (IINS, Bordeaux), Claire Hivroz (Institut Curie, Paris) Marc Bajénoff and Jean-Pierre Gorvel (CIML), as well as Philippe Robert and Audrey Ricco (AP-HM).

The LAI presented two teaching units during the Labex 1 week interdisciplinary teaching session for Starting PhD students (O Theodoly on rheology and cells mechanics, and Pierre-Henri Puech on image analysis).

LAI is happy to welcome Xuan Luo to the lab as the 2015 Labex Inform PhD fellow. Xuan is a bioengineer previously working on bioprinted microfluidic organ-on-chip platform. During her PhD project, she will work on T cell migration and chemotaxis under the supervision of Dr. Olivier Théodoly. Welcome to the lab, Xuan!