Nicolas Nguyen

Nicolas Nguyen

Nicolas was born in Picardie, spent his childhood in the mountains of Jura, and finally landed in the suburbs of Toulouse. Curious from an early age about the mechanisms of the phenomena he observed, he was also introduced to the beauty of nature and the living through the many hikes his father took him on with his brothers and sisters. In parallel, a taste for drawing and attention to detail drove him to develop a good sense of observation.

Getting to know – and appreciate! – people with Down’s syndrome since his adolescence, he became aware of the social challenges of a better understanding of and support for mental disability and started being interested in research into genetic and chromosomic diseases.

Having obtained his scientific baccalaureate, he did a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Microbiology enriched with math, physics, and computer science. He then switched to health biology in master’s, specializing in genetics and developmental biology. The two years of master’s degree were interspersed with a gap year during which he shared the daily lives of people with mental disabilities. So that, he says, ‘’Trisomy won’t be to me only a biological problem to solve, but names, faces, voices, in short, human realities not to be forgotten’’.

He did two internships in M1 at the Center for Integrative Biology (CBI) of Toulouse, on ribosomal RNA maturation process in human and budding yeast respectively; and he did his M2 research internship between the CBI (Tournier/Gachet team) and the LAAS-CNRS (with Morgan & Lucie), motivated to work on a subject where physics supports biology to understand chromosomes segregation fidelity and mitosis robustness under pressure.

He has pursued in thesis since January 2024, investigating the effects of growth-induced pressure on the cell cycle and cell adaptation in yeasts.

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