Guillaume Charras MSc, PhD

Charras obtained his graduate degree in Physics and Engineering in Paris, he became fascinated by Cell Biology and turned his research interests to Biophysics. He was fortunate to be exposed to many facts of Bioengineering and Biophysics through his Masters degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and through my PhD work at UCL. During this time, he worked in the general area of cell mechanics using experimental techniques such as AFM and electrophysiology as well as computational simulation techniques, all of which remain key to my lab’s present research.

He then decided to do a post-doc in a Cell Biology lab to acquire training in molecular cell biology techniques in Harvard Medical school. There, he was fortunate to be exposed to the fearless experimentators of the Mitchison lab, first in the department of Cell Biology and then in the department of Systems Biology. During this time, he worked primarily on blebbing and the cell cortex, at the time a rather obscure topic. This still forms one of the research directions in his laboratory and has many connections to other parts of the lab’s research. While in Boston, a chance encounter with microfluidics led me to start working on cell migration in confined environments in collaboration with Daniel Irimia at MGH.