Laurence Vico

Laurence Vico is now at the head of a new joint research unit labeled Inserm as of January 1, 2016: Sainbiose. She is resulting from the merger of four biomedical-oriented laboratories from Saint-Etienne, Sainbiose articulates fundamental, technological, clinical, and industrial research, with a view to medical and health innovations.

A graduate in biology from the University of Lyon 1 where she completed her first thesis in chronobiology, Laurence Vico found her way by joining the bone tissue biology laboratory of the Faculty of Medicine of Saint-Étienne where, with a scholarship from Canes, National Center for Space Studies, she completed a second thesis on the effect of microgravity on bone tissue in 1990. The bridge was launched between space and the biology of bone tissue, which would be at the heart of her concerns as an Inserm researcher, at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, where she has been employed since 1989 at the university site in Saint-Etienne.

Always in the same perspective, she flew in 1993 to the Nasa Ames center in Palo Alto, California, where, as a researcher, she participated in the microgravity training program for monkeys leaving for space and in the first research. which then sketched out hyper-gravity and its beneficial effects on bone tissue.

Microgravity and hyper-gravity and their effects on the skeleton associated with related alterations of bone tissue due to aging will constitute his areas of research at the head, as research director, of the Laboratory of Integrated Biology of Bone Tissue (LBTO) created in Saint-Étienne and labeled Inserm in 2003.

Laurence Vico keeps one foot in space by joining the Live sciences working group, the life sciences working group set up at the European Space Agency.