Alice Bacon
PhD student at the LUMC, The Netherlands
Alice Bacon is from France, and she has studied life science at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. She completed her bachelor’s degree in the field of Biochemistry, molecular biology and microbiology during which she had the opportunity to work on Lipid analysis of Mycobacterium smegmatis cell wall as an intern at the institute of pharmacology and structural biology (IPBS). She spent her first year of her master’s degree in biotechnologies as an exchange student in Canada at Université de Montréal and prolonged her experience abroad with an internship in proteomics at the institute for research in immunology and cancerology (IRIC). Then, she finalized her second year of master degree specialized in structural and functional biochemistry at Université Paul Sabatier and completed a 6-month internship in Bordeaux at laboratoire de biogenèse membranaire (LBM) where she worked on the lipidomic platform for the Incrementation and optimisation of plant sphingolipids analysis by LC-MS/MS. She is currently a PhD student in the Netherlands at the rheumatology department of the Leiden university medical center (LUMC). The role of B-cells and autoantibodies in rheumatic diseases are the leading topic of the team in which clinical research is closely related and embedded with laboratory work. Her PhD is focused on the molecular characterization of the immune response in arthritis. Under the supervision of Prof. Rene Toes, she aims to investigate the role of IgA auto-antibodies in the modulation of the immune response mediated by bioactive lipids. To that purpose, she studies the structure of IgA auto-antibodies and their glycosylation repertoire in order to better understand how IgA structure can affect immune cell activation especially focusing on bio-active lipid release.