Bastien MARIE

In his lab, Bastien is a bit of a neat freak: everything has to be tidy and organised. This is a very useful trait when handling pathogens in the P2 laboratory¹, where nothing must be left lying about. It’s a paradox he finds amusing when he admits he’s incapable of preparing for a meeting in advance… He joined TBI in 2019 for a simple work placement he found by chance via a Google search, and he hasn’t really left the institute since: three and a half years as an engineer working on food protein production (the Optipou and Nutripou projects), followed by a PhD since late 2022 on a project of great importance: reinventing the culture medium for the tetanus vaccine – which has remained virtually unchanged since the 1940s – to make it more stable and safer.

What stands out for him from those years? The night-time fermentation runs. The transition from daytime TBI to night-time TBI: two different worlds, punctuated by sample collections and messages on a WhatsApp group asking for help to support a colleague struggling with a reactor. He finds this same sense of solidarity in teaching, which he discovered with great pleasure during practical sessions, and which sparked a desire: to one day become a lecturer and researcher. For him, doing a PhD means learning to be independent, accepting that you’ll devote a large part of your life to it, and above all, never losing your sense of curiosity.

The rest of the time, he lives to the beat of the music: playing guitar and singing for the past ten years or so, with at least two gigs a month, ranging from metalcore to Californian pop-punk. Ever curious, he always prefers to figure things out for himself rather than delegate, even if it means spending hours on them. A curiosity which, four years after diving headfirst into tetanus, is already starting to stir elsewhere.