Mélanie PAILLARD

Mélanie Paillard is a postdoctoral researcher at Inserm U160-CarMeN laboratory in Lyon, France. Her main research focus consists in the identification of new protective strategies in ischemia-reperfusion syndromes (including myocardial infarction, stroke and cardiac arrest) by targeting mitochondria. Mélanie graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon in 2008 and obtained her PhD in Physiology in 2012 from the University Claude Bernard Lyon1. Her PhD work focused on the role of some mitochondrial functions in the mechanisms of cardiomyocyte death during ischemia-reperfusion, notably the reticulum-mitochondria interactions (Paillard el al, Circulation 2013). Mélanie joined the MitoCare center of Pr Gyorgy Hajnoczky in 2013 (Philadelphia, USA), supported by postdoctoral fellowships from Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale and the American Heart Association. During her post-doctoral training, her research led to the discovery of the physio-pathological role of MICU1, a key regulator of the mitochondrial uniporter (Antony*, Paillard* et al., Nat Comm 2016; Paillard et al, Cell Reports 2017), for which she received the Young Bioenergeticist Award in 2017. In order to develop her own translational research program on the regulation of the reticulum-mitochondria interactions during ischemia-reperfusion, Mélanie decided to join the team of Pr Michel Ovize, a recognized expert in the field of cardiovascular clinical research. She is now pursuing her career goal to establish herself as an independent researcher and to manage her translational research program for the development of new protective strategies against ischemia-reperfusion syndromes. Currently, she is investigating the role and regulation of the mitochondrial Ca2+ uniporter during cardiac and cerebral ischemia-reperfusion with her PhD student, Maya Dia.