Clement Nizak recently joined the Laboratoire Jean Perrin, and he will take part to Biophysics of micro-organisms.

Clement studies the sequence-function relation in proteins by developing large-scale molecular biology experiments and statistical data modeling. He works in close collaboration with theoreticians in statistical physics, mainly Olivier Rivoire (CIRB-College de France) and also Simona Cocco and Remi Monasson (ENS Paris).

Prior to his arrival at LJP, Clement has developed tools during his PhD thesis at the Institut Curie in Paris with Franck Perez and Bruno Goud for in vivo imaging of intracellular trafficking dynamics of the Golgi apparatus. During his postdoc at Rockefeller University in New York with Stanislas Leibler, he has then analyzed by quantitative in vivo microscopy, from a Physics perspective, evolutionary aspects of the unicellular-multicellular transition of Dictyostelium social amoebae. Upon his recruitment by CNRS at the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Physics in Grenoble, he started a new approach based on molecular biology tools to produce synthetic antibodies that bind neutral water soluble polymers as well as inorganic nanoparticles for applications in physical chemistry, in collaboration with Avi Halperin (LIPhy Grenoble), Erik Dujardin (CEMES Toulouse), Nic Spencer (ETH Zürich) and Stefan Zürcher (SuSoS). He also started there his project on the relation between sequence and function in proteins, through the statistical analysis of antibody phage display experiments read out by high throughput DNA sequencing, in collaboration with Olivier Rivoire. Next, he joined the Chemistry-Biology-Innovation unit of ESPCI-PSL in Paris to take part to the development of droplet microfluidics approaches coupled to high-throughput DNA sequencing to analyze the sequence-function relation in enzymes and in natural antibody repertoires, in collaboration with Andrew Griffiths.