LIENARD Marjorie
Assistante
Faculté des Sciences
Département des sciences de la vie
GIGA Molecular Biology of Diseases
- ULiège address
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Bât. B34 GIGA Molecular Biology of Diseases
Quartier Hôpital
avenue de l'Hôpital 11
4000 Liège
Belgique
- ULiège phone number
- +32 4 3663802
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- Conseil sectoriel à la recherche et à la valorisation
- Sciences de la Santé
- University degrees
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2004: Bioengineer (Université de Liège (Gembloux Agro Biotech))
2010: PhD (Lund University (Sweden))
Biography
Marjorie completed her MSc in Bioengineering at Gembloux Agro-Biotech (Belgium), and obtained her PhD in Biology from Lund University (Sweden), where she developed yeast-based heterologous assays to study the function and evolution of insect biosynthetic genes. Supported by EMBO and the Swedish Research Council, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University (USA) in Daniel Hartl's laboratory where she studied the genetic basis and molecular evolution of hybrid sterility. She reinforced her pedagogical skills and enthusiasm for teaching during one year with the Life Sciences Undergraduate Harvard Education, then was awarded a Wallenberg Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Naomi Pierce (Harvard) and Feng Zhang (Broad Institute). There she was fortunate to launch her research axes and implement cellular expression tools to characterize new functional types of light and heat sensitive membrane receptor proteins. She joined the Department of Biology at Lund University (Sweden) as a PI in 2019 where her lab investigated the molecular and functional basis of colour vision and visual adaptations in invertebrates, with a focus on insects and crustaceans, but also bird conservation biology.
She is a recipient of the 2023 F.R.S-FNRS Mandate for Scientific Impulsion Ulysse (MISU), and has joined the Faculty of Sciences, at the interface of GIGA and Inbios research units (ULiège). Her lab, Molecular Biology of Sensory Systems (GIGA, MBD unit), merges transcriptomic and functional tools to explore the structure-function relationships of natural invertebrate GPCR opsins and the effect of mutations on spectral tuning in an evolutionary and translational framework for light-sensing protein engineering; and investigates natural ligands for invertebrate vector disease thermoTRP channels. Merging functional genomics and the study of natural biological systems bears promises to reveal the proximate molecular mechanisms of peripheral sensory systems adaptations in non-model organisms and is relevant for the discovery and engineering of sensory receptor proteins.
Research field
- Biologie moléculaire
- Mutagenèse et technologie génétique
- Génétique moléculaire
- Évolution des espèces
- Écologie
- Physiologie des invertébrés
Duties or mandates
- Principal Investigator, MISU F.R.S-FNRS
Scientific distinctions
- Docentship (2022)
