Pauline Nauroy

Growing up in the Lyon countryside in a family where "nobody was a scientist or pursued long studies," Pauline Nauroy was a good student, and she was directed towards a scientific specialty. After her scientific baccalaureate, she enrolled in biology with little enthusiasm. That quickly changed: "A discussion with one of my teachers during my first year at Lyon 1 University made me realize that I really wanted to study biology, to understand living organisms. Then there was my first experience in a research lab, and that's when it clicked!" Pauline Nauroy is interested in the zebra fish because of this small vertebrate's extraordinary regeneration capacities, which enable it to regenerate an amputated fin in 10 days. Her thesis work aims to identify the proteins of the extracellular matrix orchestrating the fin's regeneration. That matrix is a sort of protein cement between cells, that's dynamic and able to control the behavior and evolution of cells. "Better understanding this biological process could greatly benefit regenerative and reconstructive human medicine," explains Pauline Nauroy, who is pursuing her PhD at the Institute of Functional Genomics of Lyon (IGFL), in the team "Biology and pathology of extracellular matrix" led by Florence Ruggiero.