team

Stéphane is a CNRS researcher and group leader at the Institut Jacques Monod. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, he obtained his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology under the supervision of Kay Prüfer and Svante Pääbo (Nobel Prize 2022), where he identified key genetic changes around the emergence of modern humans and reconstructed the history of Neandertals living around 120,000 years ago. He then carried out postdoctoral research with Benjamin Peter, developing a model of ancient DNA damage to estimate present-day human DNA contamination and describing ancient admixture events between modern humans and Neandertals around 200,000 years ago. He continued his postdoctoral work with Janet Kelso to reconstruct and analyse new Denisovan genomes, including the second high-quality Denisovan genome from an individual who lived 200,000 years ago.

His research combines paleogenomics and evolutionary analysis to reconstruct human population history and to understand when and how genetic variants relevant to human traits and disease arose, using human evolution as a framework for insights into present-day biology and health.

Fabien is an Associate Professor at Université Paris Cité. His doctoral thesis at the Cochin Institute under J. Chelly and his postdoctoral research in T. Bourgeron’s group at the Institut Pasteur focused on the molecular basis of neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorders and reading-related learning disabilities. He subsequently gained experience in translational research during a postdoctoral fellowship at Sanofi supervised by T. Smirnova. He later joined the “Pathology of DNA Replication” team at the Jacques Monod Institute under G. Baldacci and J.-C. Cadoret, where he applied transcriptomic, molecular, and cellular approaches to identify therapeutic targets in cancer and molecules capable of targeting them. He then transitioned to paleogenomics, working with E.-M. Geigl and T. Grange before joining our laboratory.

His current research focuses on the diversity of pathogenic bacterial genomes across historical periods, studying their phylogenetic placement and tracing the evolution of their pathogenicity factors. More broadly, his work contributes to an interdisciplinary framework integrating paleogenomics, archaeology, and evolutionary biology to study human genetic diversity, animal domestication, and pathogen dynamics, within a One Health perspective linking the environment with human and animal health.

Inês completed her MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the NOVA School of Science and Technology in Lisbon. For her thesis, she benchmarked computational algorithms for enhanced drug discovery. She then worked as a Bioinformatics Associate Consultant at Clarivate in Barcelona, where she contributed to a range of large-scale genomics and multi-omics projects.

Her work now centers on developing robust and reproducible bioinformatics pipelines for the analysis of ancient and modern human genomic data, as well as their integration with GWAS and biobank datasets.