Loan Vulliard
My bioinformatics studies at INSA Lyon sparked my interest in computational approaches to study molecular biology. There, I had the opportunity to study for a semester at KAIST in South Korea. I also completed two research internships in cancer immunoinformatics, first with Prof. Colinge and Prof. Cornillot in Montpellier, then with Prof. Nielsen in Copenhagen. These experiences motivated me to join the PhD program at CeMM in Vienna in October 2017, and the group of Prof. Menche.
After successfully defending my PhD in January 2023, I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the AI Health Innovation Cluster to work together with Dr. Hartmann and Prof. Saez-Rodriguez in Heidelberg.
Since 2021, I am also a board member of the CytoData society, with whom we strive to foster a research community dedicated to image-based profiling assays and their computational analyses. I also believe in the importance of scientific outreach and joined the organization team for the first editions of the Pint of Science festival in Austria.
0000-0002-2260-4935Research Interests
I am eager to reveal the quantitative principles underlying molecular biology and to better understand human health and diseases. For this, I use data analysis methods and collaborate with experimentalists and experts in the fields of immunology and cell biology.
My undergraduate work focused on detecting and characterizing neoepitopes across cancer types, based on sequencing data.
In my doctoral work, I studied cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations. I planned and coordinated imaging screens of combinations of CRISPR knockouts and drug treatments. I also established an image and data analysis pipeline to quantify morphological
changes in these experiments in order to create a map of how genes and drugs interact.
My current aim is to develop and apply computational methods to profile and explain metabolic changes in multiplexed ion beam imaging experiments. I aim to contextualize and explain how spatial changes in the tumor immune microenvironment relate to disease stratification and therapeutic responses.
Professional Career
| 2023–present | AIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the groups of Felix Hartmann at the DKFZ and Julio Saez-Rodriguez at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University, in Heidelberg, Germany |
| 2017–2023 | predoctoral fellow in the group of Jörg Menche at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Max Perutz Labs in Vienna, Austria |
Education
| 2017–2023 | PhD in Medical lnformatics, Biostatistics & Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria |
| 2012–2017 | MSc (Diplôme d'ingénieur) in Bioinformatics and Biosciences at INSA Lyon, France |