Thomas Lecuit is a biologist whose research focuses on morphogenesis, i.e. the origin of forms in living organisms, such as a neuron or an embryo. During embryogenesis, millions of cells divide, move, change shape and collectively give rise to a complex organism. What are the mechanical forces at play, and what information flows guide these complex processes to their conclusion ?
To answer these questions, Thomas Lecuit heads a research team at the Institut de biologie du développement in Marseille. His interdisciplinary team uses Drosophila as a model organism, experimentally observing, characterizing and perturbing the physical and biological properties of development, and collaborating with physicists on theoretical and modeling approaches.
Thomas Lecuit is Director of the Marseille-based Turing Center for Living Systems, an interdisciplinary center that studies complexity and self-organization in biology, through the contribution of physics, computer science, mathematics and biology.
He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea, and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. He is also the recipient of several awards, including the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences (2015) and the CNRS Silver Medal (2015).
