Florence Bansept (LCB)
Mathematical modeling of the ecology & evolution of host-associated microbiota
Background
March 2023 - present | CENTURI group leader
2019 - 2023 | Post-doctoral: Modeling of microbial communities, in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany
2015 - 2018 | PhD in Biology: Biophysical modeling of bacterial population dynamics
& the immune response in the gut, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
2013 - 2015 | Msc in Physics: Macroscopic physics and Complexity - with honors
École Normale Supérieure, International Center for Fundamental Physics, Paris, France
2012 - 2013 | Bachelor in Fundamental Physics, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Location
Campus Joseph Aiguier
About her research
My research uses statistical physics and mathematical modeling to study biological systems. I am particularly interested in microbial communities that live in association with hosts, a.k.a. microbiomes, and aim at addressing a wide range of related questions, like:
How do hosts and microbes co-evolve?
How is the microbiota diversity maintained in the host?
What are the control mechanisms that the host can exert on its microbiota at minimal costs?
How can within-host microbial dynamics impact an infectious spread at the scale of the host population?
Can microbiota modeling provide valuable insights for clinical applications or to public health decision makers?
![schema schema](https://centuri-livingsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/schema.png)
To study these questions, I use a combination of analytical and numerical techniques with stochastic simulations and collaborate and frequently exchange with experimentalists.
Research on microbiome dynamics presents specific challenges. As meta-omics enable the gathering of more and more observational data, mechanistic modeling – that is, modeling that proposes causal mechanisms to explain observed data – remains crucially needed. One key challenge that requires particular efforts and that I find particularly exciting is the inference of dynamical parameters from indirect snapshot data – a problem similar to the one of a detective having to reconstitute what has happened from the clues on the crime scene only.