
Lucie Khemtemourian
Summary
Lucie Khemtemourian received an engineer diploma in chemistry from the Ecole Européenne de Chimie, Polymères et Matériaux (ECPM) in Strasbourg, France. She also received a Master degree of chemistry from the University of Saarbrücken, Germany. She performed her Ph.D. in Biophysics working on the synthesis, the structure and the dynamics of membrane peptides. Then, she joined Antoinette Killian’s group (University Utrecht) for 3 years as a postdoc. She worked on the interactions of amyloid peptides and artificial membranes using a biophysical approach. She was appointed associate scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in 2009 in Laboratory of Biomolecules (Paris). In 2019, she moved to the Institute of Chemistry and Biology of Membranes and Nano-objects (CBMN) in Bordeaux and joined the team “spectroscopy and imaging of membrane active peptides”.
Using a pluridisciplinary approach conjugating peptide chemistry, biophysics and biochemistry, she has been interested in studying amyloid forming proteins. In particular, she tries to i) understand the process of fibril formation in solution and in membrane environments, ii) determine why some proteins are toxic and form fibrils only to specific cell lines, iii) find new molecules that inhibit fibril formation and cell death, and to iv) understand the behaviour of extrinsic and intrinsic factors that modulate fibril formation.