Hervé Turlier

Engineer from École Polytechnique (X2006), Hervé Turlier defended a thesis on the physics of cell division in 2013 under the supervision of Jean-François Joanny and Jacques Prost at the Institut Curie. Winner of the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation Young Researcher Award and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship, he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, in 2014 for a three-year post-doctorate. Straddling the teams of François Nédélec and Takashi Hiiragi, he worked there on the physical modeling of morphogenesis in the early mouse embryo. In 2017, thanks to the support of an ATIP-Avenir grant, he joined the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en biologie at the Collège de France to create the "Multi-scale physics of morphogenesis" team. Since then, his team has focused on physical and numerical modeling of the early stages of embryonic development, taking into account the interaction of several scales - subcellular, cellular and multicellular - in close collaboration with biologists in France and abroad. Recipient of a European ERC Starting grant in 2020, his project for the next five years is to reverse-engineer a digital twin of the early embryo, combining physics, mechanics and artificial intelligence. He will be awarded the Paoletti Prize in 2021.