Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland
• Joined the research group of MER PhD Julien Puyal, focusing on autophagy, cell death, and neuroprotection in perinatal brain injury, for my Master’s thesis project • Thesis: Investigating the role of selective autophagy pathways in neonatal hypoxic-ischemic brain injury • Isolated and conducted experiments on primary cortical neurons modeling cerebral hypoxia/ischemia in vitro • Applied techniques including immunoblotting, extracellular vesicle isolation, immunoprecipitation assays, confocal microscopy, lentivirus-mediated knockdowns, and cellular assays to study how distinct organelles and protein complexes are selectively targeted by autophagy during hypoxic-ischemic injury
• Joined the research group of Prof. Pierre Marquet (Centre for Psychiatric Neurosciences) for a pre-master project focused on optimizing neuronal cell culture and neurodifferentiation protocols to generate functional cortical neurons for mood disorder research • Worked with neural progenitor cells derived from iPSCs reprogrammed from fibroblasts • Focused on evaluating manual selection of neural rosettes and testing different cell culture conditions to improve outcomes and consistency in neuronal yield
• Joined the research group of Dr. Carmen Gonelle-Gispert (Surgical Research Unit, led by Prof. Michel Adamina, MD) for my Bachelor’s project • Conducted a research project investigating size heterogeneity of islet cell clusters in the juvenile porcine pancreas, performing immunofluorescence staining and contributing to the development and application of image analysis workflows for large imaging datasets • Presented findings at the 18th IXA Congress (Geneva) and the SCS Annual Meeting 2026 (Lucerne)
• Undertook a voluntary internship in the clinical laboratories of Fribourg Cantonal Hospital (HFR), rotating through hematology, clinical chemistry, and microbiology • Gained insight into diagnostic laboratory workflows and practical experience in microbiology, including microscopy and Gram staining, sample culture and isolation, colony examination and identification (assessment of colony morphology, MALDI-TOF, PCR), antibiotic susceptibility testing, and specialized diagnostic assays
• Completed a four-week internship in the research group of Prof. Jens Volker Stein, focusing on tissue-specific CD8+ T cell biology during adaptive immune responses • Observed experimental approaches and gained practical exposure to organ harvesting from small rodents, cell isolation and culture, tissue sectioning and staining, flow cytometry, confocal and multiphoton microscopy, and PCR
Short observational internship in the research group of Dr. Pierre-Yves Mantel, focusing on malaria research