About
Sara obtained her PhD in Genetics and Neurodevelopment from Sorbonne Université (Paris, France) in 2016. She carried out her doctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Fiona FRANCIS at the Institut du Fer à Moulin, where she studied the development of the mammalian cerebral cortex and the pathophysiological mechanisms of cortical malformations in the mouse. In 2016, Sara joined the laboratory of Prof. Christopher A. WALSH at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital (USA) as a postdoctoral fellow, where she began studying somatic mosaicism in the human brain. Her main postdoctoral work showed that somatic mosaic variants detected in post-mortem human tissue can serve as reliable natural markers of cell lineages, revealing clonal dynamics during development. In 2021, she was awarded a Horizon 2020 MSCA Postdoctoral Reintegration Fellowship to join the laboratory of Dr. Stéphanie BAULAC at the Paris Brain Institute (ICM), where she continued my work on somatic mosaicism. There, she studied the role of pathogenic somatic variants in epileptic developmental brain disorders. In 2023, she obtained a tenured researcher/principal investigator (CRCN) position at Inserm and an ERC Starting Grant to study somatic mosaicism and cell lineages in human neurodevelopment and disease. That same year, she was awarded the FENS–EJN Young Investigator Prize 2024 by the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and the European Journal of Neuroscience. In January 2025, Sara joined Institut Imagine in Paris to establish her research group.
