A warm welcome to Dr. Louise Thines, recipient of a MSCA postdoctoral fellowship, who is joining the research team led by Prof. Henri-François Renard

Dr. Louise Thines is a bioengineer and holds a PhD in Molecular biology & Biochemistry. She conducted her doctoral thesis from 2015 to 2019 in the group of Prof. Pierre Morsomme at the UCLouvain, LIBST. Her research focused on using yeast and bacteria as model organisms to study a membrane transporter involved in a group of human diseases called CDG or Congenital disorders of Glycosylation (Thines et al., 2020 ; Thines et al., 2019 ;  Thines et al., 2018). In 2020, Louise continued her academic career in the USA as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Within the team of Dr. David Sacks, she investigated the role of calmodulin and IQGAPs in signal transduction pathways (Thines et al., 2024; Thines et al., 2023 ; Thines et al., 2023 ; Thines et al., 2022).

Thanks to a Marie Skłodowska Curie (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowship, Louise has now returned to Belgium and has just started a second postdoc term at the UNamur on June 1, 2024, joining the team of Prof. Henri-François Renard. Her project will explore the mechanisms regulating unconventional endocytosis, and, in the longer term, identify pharmacological inhibitors of these mechanisms. The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the role of endocytic processes in pathophysiological contexts, such as cancer cell migration and viral infection, potentially paving the way for new therapeutic applications. 

The project will be carried out in collaboration with Prof. Johan Wouters from the UNamur Chemistry department for the drug design work and with Dr. Laura Picas from the IRIM in Montpellier for the viral cell entry studies.