Sacha Ichbiah

After training as an engineer at the École Polytechnique, Sacha Ichbiah joined Hervé Turlier's team as a PhD student, co-supervised by Professor Jean-François Joanny. He is interested in transdisciplinary issues, at the frontier between biology, physics and microscopy image analysis. In collaboration with the laboratory of Guillaume Charras (University College London), he is studying the mechanics of the early development of the nematode C. Elegans. In particular, he is determining the links between the surface tension of the embryo's membranes and the combined effects of myosin and cadherin, molecules impacting the tension of the cell's cortex. He is also interested in force inference in a more general framework, and is developing methods to extract the geometry of cell surfaces in embryos and organoids in a robust way, combining approaches from soft physics and mathematical tools ranging from discrete differential geometry to more generic optimization methods.