Physics of Biological Membranes

​Patricia Bassereau is currently CNRS Directrice de Recherche (equivalent to professor) at the Institut Curie in Paris, where she also leads the group "Membranes and cellular functions". She completed her PhD in Soft Matter at the University of Montpellier, where she began her career on the structure of self-assembled surfactant-based systems. She spent one year as a visiting scientist at the IBM Almaden Center (San Jose, USA), where she focused on thin polymer films. She moved to the Institut Curie in 1993 to work on questions related to "Physics of the cell." With her group, she is developing a multidisciplinary approach, largely based on synthetic biology and biomimetic systems as well as quantitative mechanical and microscopy methods, to better understand the role of biological membranes in cellular functions. Additionally, she studies in vitro and in cellulo the mechanics and the generation of cellular protrusions. She is currently chairperson of the French Physics Society (SFP) group "Physics and living matter" and an associate editor for eLife and Molecular Biology of the Cell. She has been honored with several awards, including a Suffrage Science Award from the Royal Society, the MRC and L’Oréal, and an Emmy Noether Distinction from the European Physical Society. She is a Fellow of the Biophysical Society.