Alice Lacombe is a French molecular biologist with a special interest in mitochondrial biology. She received her M.Sc. in Immunology Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Joseph Fourier (France) in 2015, then obtained her PhD in 2020 in Molecular Parasitology at the University of Glasgow (UK) centered on the intracellular parasite Toxoplasma gondii, for which she detected the mitoribosome for the first time in the field and established a novel biochemical assay to monitor mitochondrial translation in T. gondii. In 2022, Alice was awarded the Seal of Excellence under the Horizon MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2021 call to conduct her project “MAGIC” at the department of Biology of the University of Padova in Prof. Luca Scorrano’s laboratory. She studies Autosomal Dominant Optic Atrophy (ADOA), a rare genetic disease caused by mutations in the mitochondrial protein Opa1, and characterized by the progressive loss of vision. Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the retinal neurons mainly affected, are prone to cell death leading to the optic nerve degeneration. Her work focuses in shedding light on the pathological molecular pathways behind the loss of axonal mitochondria in ADOA RGCs shown to be responsible for the low cell survival and associated with the loss of vision in an ADOA mouse model. She is also working on identifying drug candidates able to restore axonal mitochondria distribution as a mean to boost RGC survival and potentially restore vision.