After a multidisciplinary scientific education at the Ecole Polytechnique, Lydia obtained in 2010 a PhD in microbiology under the supervision of François Taddei. During her PhD, in collaboration with S. Jun’s team, she developed a microfluidic device, now called the “mother machine”, allowing for the first time the microscopic observation of bacteria growing in controlled conditions, at the single-cell level on a long time-scale.
Lydia, after becoming a tenured researcher at INRAE, worked at the Laboratoire Jean Perrin (Sorbonne Université) from 2010 to 2020, before joining the Micalis institute. She has been developing new quantitative approaches to address basic questions in biology, using bacteria as model organisms. These approaches combine single-cell experiments, based on microfluidics and microscopy, and theoretical developments from probability theory and statistical physics.
Since 2014, she has been working on mutagenesis, one important cellular process that had remained beyond the reach of single-cell studies, due to the lack of appropriate tools. In collaboration with Marina Elez, she developed such tools, and followed for the first time the dynamics of spontaneous point mutations and their effects in E. coli, at the single-cell level
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