François Peaudecerf

Very exciting news: I will be starting a new position as a tenure-track assistant professor ("Chaire Professeur Junior") at the University of Rennes 1 , in the Physics Institute of Rennes (IPR) from December 1st 2022. I will start my own research group investigating bacterial impacts on the dynamics of air-water interfaces in the soil, trying to shed light on soil drying in a changing climate. I will be co-affiliated with the Soft Matter and Divided Media Departments. Stay tuned for more details soon!

Our work on the predation of bacteria by amoeba, led by Frédéric de Schaetzen and Mingzhen Fan, is fresh out in PNAS! Chemotaxis assays, clever bacterial tracking, and scaling arguments of encounters enabled us to shed light on the bacterial capture process. Check it out there!

Another great opportunity to present my work on the microlayer, first as a talk at the Gordon Research Seminar Marine Microbes, and thereafter as a poster for the associated Gordon Research Conference. It was very interesting to get insight on the life in the microlayer from a more biological point of view.

I got the chance to give a talk on my work on the behavior of bacteria in the microlayer in response to aerosol deposition at the 6th Microscale Ocean Biophysics conference in Port de Sollers (Mallorca). Great conference, great interactions and feedback, looking forward to the next one.

I contributed to a modelling paper now out in Nature Communications, led by Dr. Trang Nguyen (in the group of Prof. Naomi Levine) which gives insight into the coupled dynamics of microbes and the marine snow particles they thrive on. Check the paper here! Illustration from Nguyen et al. 2022, CC BY 4.0

I contributed to a book chapter in the second edition of "The Marine Microbiomes", describing how the microscale physics in the ocean create the complex landscape of resources marine bacteria have to navigate. It's a pleasure to see it published.

Jess Berry, from the University of Cambridge, led this study aiming to design and test a microfluidic chip enabling quantitative and accurate testing of drugs preventing blood clotting. I contributed to the development of the chip, and am very happy to this work published in Lab on a Chip! Check the paper here!

Our paper on the coupling between marine snow sinking speed and microbial degradation is just published in Nature Geosciences. I developped a mathematical model to extend the experimental results of my colleagues Uria Alcolombri to realistic marine snow distributions. Our work made it to the ETH news. Check the paper here, and the code behind the model here.

With my colleagues Dr. Jeanette Wheeler, Dr. Clara Martines-Pérez and Juanita Lara-Gutierrez, we organised a workshop for teenagers during the outreach event Scientifica 2021 happening all over ETH and UHZ. Taylor's robots, play-dough plankton sinking in glycerol and microscopy of daphnia were part of the fun!

The figure designed by lead author Theresa Jakuszeit for our paper on chemokinesis was chosen to be on cover of the March Issue of EPJE.

I had the chance to contribute to a freshly published paper on microbial mutualisms. Led by Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer under the supervision of Otti Croze, with further collaborators in Sweden and UK, the study combine mathematical modelling with nano-SIMS to reveal the hidden dynamics of mutualistic nutrient exchanges. Very pleased to see the paper in PLoS ONE, here.

Our modelling paper on chemokinesis led by Theresa Jakuszeit with Otti Croze has been published in the European Physical Journal E! You can check it out here , but also see the associated News alert on EurekaAlert! .

With Margit Peaudecerf, we assembled and released a Jupyter notebook presenting some of the concepts behind the use of single particle tracking for probing the biophysical properties of the cell cytosol. Lots of interactive simulations! Download the whole repository from GitHub or open the notebook in Binder to start simulations directly in your browser!