Patricia Bassereau is CNRS Directrice de Recherche (equivalent to professor) at the Institut Curie in Paris where she is the leader of the group "Membranes and cellular functions". She started her carrier in Soft matter. She received a "Thèse de 3ème cycle" (short PhD) in 1985 and a PhD in 1990 in Soft Condensed Matter from the Montpellier University, in the south of France. She got her CNRS position in 1986.
She worked five years in Montpellier (at the GDPC) on the structure of self-assembled surfactant-based systems and one year as a visiting scientist at the IBM Almaden Center (San Jose, USA) on the structure of thin polymer films. In 1993, Patricia decided to switch topic and came to the Institut Curie. She first studied the interactions of soluble proteins with polymer monolayers, but soon after started to address questions related to "Physics of the cell." She develops a multidisciplinary approach, largely based on synthetic biology and on the development and study of biomimetic systems, to understand the role of lipid membranes in important cellular functions such as intracellular trafficking, endo/exocytosis, transmembrane transport of ions ("active membranes"), protein diffusion or cell adhesion.
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