The role

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate strongly interested in interdisciplinary science, to join our groups (van de Pavert and Guignard labs) and work on a project at the crossroad between Computer Science and Developmental Biology.

The project aims at studying lymph node (LN) formation during mouse embryonic development. LN formation requires hematopoietic lymphoid tissue inducer cells (LTi) to interact with mesenchymal cells at precise locations within the embryo, where they subsequently form aggregates. We have postulated that the peripheral nervous system outgrowth initiates the earliest events in LN formation. Indeed, preliminary data show that LTi aggregates morphology and cell density is affected in mouse embryos lacking neuronal subsets.

To understand the relationship between neuronal outgrowth and lymph node formation, the successful candidate will work between the van de Pavert lab and the Guignard lab to develop new computational methods to reconstruct and quantify LTi aggregates and peripheral nervous system morphology at the single cell scale. The reconstructions will then be used to develop a machine learning framework to systematically quantify phenotypes in perturbed mouse embryos. These quantifications will in turn allow to model the effects of neuronal outgrowth on LN formation.

The successful candidate will work towards:

• building a library of whole-mount mouse embryo images

• developing computational methods for the analysis of the generated library, including: reconstruction and mapping of the neuronal network and quantification of LTi aggregate morphologies and positions

• developing computational methods to automatically stage mouse embryos

• modelling LN formation in relation to neuronal network morphology