Aurélien Courtois

Postdoctoral Fellow

Seeing without presupposition, thinking without limitation. 

Aurélien did his master degree at the the European School for Biotechnology (ESBS), training successively in Strasbourg [France], Karlsruhe, Freiburg [Germany] and Basel [Switzerland]. In the course of his studies, he visited the laboratory of Jose Luis Bocco in Córdoba [Argentina]. He then branched out of biotechnology and joined Takashi Hiiragi at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) in Freiburg to study the mouse early embryo development, then followed Takashi Hiiragi during his successive moves to the MPI in Münster and to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg [Germany]. After gaining his PhD in 2013, he settled in Japan and joined Tomoya Kitajima at the BDR (former CDB) RIKEN in Kobe, and worked on the mechanisms of chromosome segregation during the mouse female meiosis. During his time in Japan, he received two successive grants to start his own independent project on establishing the opossum Monodelphis domestica as a new powerful model for developmental biology.

Aurélien moved to London in 2021 to join the effort of the laboratory of James Turner to study the opossum development, notably in the context of sex chromosomes, and pursue his project of transposing live-imaging and micromanipulation techniques in the opossum.