Advanced NMR Spectroscopy

Olivier Lafon is professor at the University of Lille and honorary member of Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). The focus of his research is to push the frontiers of solid-state NMR spectroscopy in order to gain unique insights into the structure-property relationships of materials used in the field of energy, bioeconomy and health. His current research interests notably include the development of novel solid-state NMR methods, especially at high magnetic fields, for quadrupolar nuclei or using Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) as well as their application for the characterization of materials, including battery materials, quantum dots, photovoltaic materials, heterogeneous catalysts and porous materials. Olivier Lafon received B.Sc. in physical chemistry from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He passed the agrégation in physical sciences. He received MS and PhD from the University of Paris South. He was awarded the Magnetic Resonance in Chemistry Award for Young Scientists by the Euromar scientific committee. He is the director of Lille high-field NMR facility, which hosts 1.2 GHz NMR spectrometer for the study of liquids and solids and belongs to INFRANALYTICS research infrastructure. He also coordinates the French network of research infrastructure in physical sciences and engineering (IR SMI). He is also a member of the editorial board of "Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance".

Dr. Robert Schneider studied biology and physics in Munich (Germany) and Cambridge (USA). During his Ph.D. thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen (Germany), he applied solid-state NMR spectroscopy to membrane and fibrillar proteins. His work led to a structural model of the inactivated state of a potassium channel as well as of fibrils formed by polyglutamine peptides. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Biologie Structurale in Grenoble (France), he studied interactions of intrinsically disordered proteins in kinetic detail using solution-state NMR. He has held a position as assistant professor at the University of Lille since 2014, where he continued to study membrane and disordered proteins using NMR spectroscopy in solution and in the solid state. From April 2021 to November 2023, he has worked as NMR application scientist with Bruker Biospin in Fällanden (Switzerland), focusing on protein NMR and ligand screening applications. In December 2023, he moved back into academic science, accepting a CEA researcher position at the Institute de Biologie Structurale in Grenoble (France).

Dr. Patrick Giraudeau is a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Nantes. His research activities at the CEISAM Research Institute are focused on the development of quantitative NMR methods for the analysis of complex mixtures, including applications to metabolomics and fluxomics. Highlights include the development of fast multidimensional quantitative experiments at high fields and also on benchtop spectrometers as well as recent investigations in dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization. He received his Ph.D. degree in Nantes in 2008, then he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). In 2009, he became an Associate Professor at the University of Nantes, where he became a Full Professor in 2017. In 2014, he became a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France and received a consolidator grant from the European Research Council in 2018. He is an associate editor of Magnetic Resonance in Chemistry, the vice-president of the French Metabolomics and Fluxomics Network (RFMF), and the head of the CEISAM-Corsaire-MetaboHUB NMR facility.

Dr. Luisa Ciobanu is a neurophysicist who focuses on the development of ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging (UHF-MRI) techniques for the understanding of the fundamental physical principles underlying biological function. Dr. Ciobanu received her doctorate in physics from Ohio State University in 2002. She then went on to do post-doctoral training in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After her postdoc, she has held research appointments at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Pfizer, Inc. (Michigan, Ann Arbor). In 2007, she joined NeuroSpin at CEA-Saclay, France, where she heads the NeuroPhysics team.

Dr. Yann Guérardel is a biochemist whose research focuses on structure-to-function relationships of complex glycoconjugates in different biological contexts including host-parasite interactions and human diseases. He obtained a PhD in biochemistry at Lille University and conducted post-doctoral trainings in Academia Sinica of Taipei (Taiwan) and in Nagoya University (Japan) to develop the use of high-field liquid-state NMR and mass spectrometry for the structural analysis of carbohydrates. He is presently senior researcher at the CNRS, acts as Director of the Institute for Structural and Functional Glycobiology (UGSF, UMR CNRS 8576) and is associate professor at iGCORE, Gifu University, Japan.

Caroline Smet-Nocca is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Lille. Driven by a strong commitment to science and education, she pursued an academic career following her Ph.D (2004, Lille University) and joined the University of Lille as an Assistant Professor in 2009. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2022. Her research integrates approaches from biochemistry, chemistry, and biophysics, and aims to elucidate how post-translational modifications regulate protein structure and function. Her current work focuses on the molecular mechanisms underlying Alzheimer’s disease, particularly those involving the loss of Tau protein function, its aggregation into toxic species and neuron-to-neuron propagation. After investigating these mechanisms in solution, she is now exploring them in a pathophysiological context using relevant neuronal models.