Baptiste Le Roi
Doctoral Student
I am currently a PhD student at MaozLab. I developed my initial interest in organs on chip at the IEMN (Lille) under Dr. Vincent Senez’s team (BioMEMS) where the project was to mimic intestinal brush borders in order to understand the effect of geometry and growth factors on cell development. I continued at Khademhosseini Lab (Harvard Medical School) with two projects. One was to develop a 3D printer to print microfluidic chips with two cell-charged materials and the other one was to mimic skin with a three cells layer model. I ended a position of staff engineer at BMBI lab (University of Compiègne) under the supervision of Dr. Anne Virginie Salsac and Prof. Dominique Barthès-Biésel studying mechanical behavior of hydrogels used in vascular embolisation.
I came to MaozLab totally unwittingly. I was applying to several positions in Europe and professors never had funds. Bouncing from P.I to P.I, I finally bumped into Ben Maoz and Anna Herland (Sweden) and it has been a revelation, I will do my PhD with them! The freedom in the research, the happiness of the students when I came to visit convinced me to stay.
During my PhD I would like to mix my knowledge on microfabrication techniques and tissue engineering with the mechanical skill I acquired. This double expertise may be an asset to determine which hydrogel would be the most relevant for creating a vascularized organ on chip regarding ease of use and material-cell interaction.
I am general administrator of a Fablab I co-founded which works with many art and architecture schools. One of the projects was to engrave on a hair. This project required the use of a FIB-SEM and allowed us to show a highly technical procedure to a public audience. The hair (and micro photographs) was exhibited in a museum (Palais de Tokyo) and at the headquarters of Twitter Paris in summer 2017. In order to reinforce my interest in art and science influences, I created a 24 hours lecture of Science-Art interaction mixing students from Art School and Engineering School and we collaborate with CERN to do an exhibition of 20 pieces of art about Higgs Boson and Physics (Collision, Espace Croisé, Tourcoing).