I grew up in Québec, Canada, and obtained a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Université de Montréal, a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in structural biology at Harvard University. My interests are in mechanisms of transport and signaling across cellular membranes, studying several different, large families of transporters and ion channels. I focus on structural and functional analyses of these proteins, to uncover the molecular mechanisms and how those have evolved and diverged across members of the protein family.
The mission of the my lab is to be a collegial, highly interactive, diverse and intellectually stimulating environment in which each lab member can develop into a successful scientist and progress to the next step in their career. Our research program centers on understanding the structure, function and evolution of several families of membrane proteins, using state-of-the-art experimental and computational approaches to generate new data and incorporating analyses that leverage publicly available datasets.
At Harvard, I’m in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, which I currently chair. I’m co-Director of the Biophysics PhD Program, and also a member of three additional PhD programs: Molecules, Cells and Organisms; Chemical Biology; Neuroscience. I co-teach LS1a, an integrated introduction to chemistry and biology targeted at first-year undergraduates.