Deputy director

Nicolas Minc

Nicolas Minc is a physicist and biologist. After defending his doctoral thesis at the Institut Curie in 2005, he completed a post-doc at Colombia University (New York, USA), focusing on cell morphogenesis in yeast and sea urchin embryos, combining approaches from physics. In 2013, he set up his “Cell Spatial Organization” research team at the Institut Jacques Monod. That same year, he was awarded the Prix Emergence(s) by the City of Paris. In 2014, he won the ERC Consolidator grant for the FORCASTER project: Force, Motion and Positioning of MT asters, and in 2018, he was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal.

Currently, the Minc team is studying how cells establish their particular morphology and internal organization in order to perform their given functions. The team takes a broad, multidisciplinary approach to this problem, using different organisms to identify the general principles that control cell morphogenesis. A characteristic of the team is the integration and development of cutting-edge quantitative approaches, such as microfabrication, mathematical modeling and image analysis tools, to address the fundamental questions of morphogenesis. To achieve these goals, the Minc team combines expertise from different fields, including chemistry, biology and physics.