Jules Mérian is an enthusiastic researcher that aim to decipher how cell homeostasis is metabolically maintained in physiological and pathological contexts. He obtained his Ph.D. in Cell Biology at the University of Toulouse, France, in 2022. During his PhD, he developed a project at the Institute of Metabolic and Cardiovascular Diseases of Toulouse in which he showed that intermittent fasting, as a non-invasive activation of autophagy, can either promote or hamper atherosclerosis development, depending on the nutritional behaviour. Furthermore, his Ph.D. work shed the light on the ambivalent role of autophagy in the regulation of liver integrity and metabolic functions. He got particularly interested in the preponderant place that mitochondria take in the hepatic adaptation to starvation. He started working in 2023 at the University of Padova’s Department of Biology with the objective of improving his expertise toward mitochondria biology and metabolism.
In 2024, he was awarded a MSCA European Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out the METACT project with Prof. Luca Scorrano at UNIPD. METACT aim primarily at expending the scientific knowledge toward the cross-communication between interorganellar contact sites, and the nature of their regulation. Particularly, Jules’ main objective is to understand whether the tri-organellar PEWM complex could be considered as an individual unit, and how its formation could possibly be impacted by metabolic stimuli. Importantly, this could foster the identification of innovative therapeutical targets for the treatment of metabolic dysfunction-associated liver steatotic diseases.