Timothée Lionnet

I am a biophysicist who develops novel imaging technologies to understand the fundamental principles of gene expression.

During my PhD (with V. Croquette at the ENS), I built a magnetic tweezers microscope to discover that DNA stretches when overwound, a property that could be used for sequence recognition. I also explored how DNA helicases convert chemical energy into the force needed to unwind DNA. During my postdoc in the lab of Rob Singer (Einstein), I continued developing single molecule technologies, this time to monitor gene expression in living cells. I then moved to Janelia to lead the Transcription Imaging Consortium. Bringing together experts from various fields, we developed innovative technologies to image the transcription process at molecular scale in living cells.
Since moving to NYU, the lab studies how dynamic, spatially organized molecular events control gene expression and cell fate. We develop single-molecule imaging, modeling, and perturbation tools that make these processes directly measurable in living cells, allowing us to address longstanding questions inaccessible to genomics alone: how transcription factors find and act on their targets, how 3D genome organization shapes transcription, and how dynamic cell states drive cancer adaptation.
     
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