Dear colleagues,

In the frame of the ongoing collaboration between our groups at Matière et Systèmes Complexes (biophysics and modelling) and Institut Curie (genetics and developmental biology), we open a 2.5-year postdoc position at University of Paris – Diderot. It will be open until we will find a suitable candidate. We expect it to start in early 2021 and it can even start immediately.

The metamorphosis of Drosophila fly, from a maggot to an adult animal, is an ideal system to study the interplay between genetics and mechanics during morphogenesis (1). The dorsal thorax tissue, which is a monolayer of several thousands of cells, exhibits a remarkable left-right symmetrical metamorphosis, although its left and right parts arise from disjoined regions. Our recently acquired live imaging and data cover this metamorphosis from intracellular scale to tissue scale and from minutes to several days. The candidate will incorporate this wealth of experimental results within a multiscale modelling strategy to uncover how the genetic and mechanic information is established and exchanged throughout the tissue.

Analytical modeling skills are required in either statistical physics, or biophysics; numerical modeling skills are a plus. The candidate should be willing to actively interact with experimentalists. Past experience related with genetics and developmental biology could be a plus and the candidate might choose to participate in experiments.

Candidates should send a CV and a motivation letter to François Graner <francois.graner@univ-paris-diderot.fr> and arrange three reference
letters to be sent to the same address.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information. Best

François Graner et Yohanns Bellaïche

(1) see for instance :

Bosveld F, Bonnet I, Guirao B, Tlili S, Wang Z, Petitalot A, Marchand
R, Bardet PL, Marcq P, Graner F, Bellaïche Y. 2012. Mechanical control
of morphogenesis by Fat/Dachsous/Four-jointed planar cell polarity
pathway. Science.  336 :724-7. PMID:  22499807.

Guirao B, Rigaud SU, Bosveld F, Bailles A, López-Gay J, Ishihara S,
Sugimura K, Graner F, Bellaïche Y. 2015 Unified quantitative
characterization of epithelial tissue development. Elife. pii: e08519.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.08519. PMID: 26653285