People

Antoine Frénoy is an assistant professor in evolutioray biology and computer science. His main research interests include computational models for evolutionary dynamics, microbial communities, fitness landscapes and effect of mutations. He was part of the TIMC lab between 2019 and 2025, and joined the LIG (team Aptikal) in january 2026.

Magali Richard was initially trained in biology (experimental genetics and cell biology). During her postdoc, she joined a multidisciplinary team made up of biologists, computer scientists and statisticians to learn how to develop biostatistical approaches to analyse high-throughput omic data. Then she became interested in the evolution of tumor as a complex heterogeneous ecosystem. In 2025, she joined the LIG (team ’APTIKAL’) as a CNRS researcher to tackle this question through the development of novel dedicated computational approaches.

Phuong Thao Chu is a study engineer in the team since January 2026.

Nicolas Homberg is a GRICAD research engineer. His reasearch projects are closely related to the team and he is co-supervised by Magali Richard.

Lucie Lamothe is a research engineer supervised by Magali Richard, working on improving deconvolution methods for Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) data, and data generation for data challenges. She joined the team in january 2024.

Hugo Barbot is a PhD student cosupervised by Magali Richard, David Causeur (Agro-Campus, Rennes) and Yuna Blum (IGDR, Rennes), on the topic: “Statistical methods for deconvolution”.

I am Quentin Fernandez de Grado, currently in the third year of my PhD at LIG, within the Aptikal team. My thesis aims to enhance our knowledge of the evolutionary mechanisms impacting an organism’s journey toward adaptation. First, we will study the selective pressures that shape the order of genes in operons. Second, we will investigate the evolutionary mechanisms that affect the evolution of a population’s mutation rate, and the impact on the genome organization.

Arafate Idrissou is a PhD student in computational immunology. He is co-supervised by Magali Richard and Marc Dalod, on the topic“: Computational analysis and mathematical modeling of regulatory networks controlling plasmacytoid dendritic cell biology”.

Juliette Louistisserand is a PhD student co-supervised by Antoine Frénoy and Magali Richard, on the topic: “Interactions between the functional heterogeneity of tumors and cancer evolution”.

Luis Martin Pena is a PhD student cosupervised by Magali Richard and Nelle Varoquaux on the analysis of Spatial Transcriptomic data in pacxreatic adenocarcinoma.

Aurélien Tauzin is a PhD student.

Zakaria Tougui is a PhD student working on the quantitative characterisation of the human gut microbiome, with a focus on the small intestine, combining publicly available data with data obtained from collaborators at TIMC using a newly developped non-invasive sampling method. This thesis is supervised by Antoine Frénoy, Nelle Varoquaux and Philippe Cinquin