Guillaume Gay

I am currently working as an independent researcher and software developer in physical biology and cell biophysics. I mainly devise numerical models of biological phenomena, such as chromosome segregation during mitosis, or fold formation in cellular tissues.

I am a python software user and developer.

I studied physics and chemistry in Bordeaux, Strasbourg and Toulouse, France. During my PhD, I worked on experiments trying to combine laser cooled atoms and light fields generated by small apertures in metallic films, called surface plasmon polaritons. I defended my thesis in June 2006, and shortly after made a small jump to another building of my alma mater university in Toulouse and found myself in a cell biology lab, in Sylvie Tournier's team. I was hired thanks to my optics know-how, in order to work on a FRAP and micro-discection apparatus on a wide field microscope. This left me with some spare time, so I started working on automated tracking procedures for microscopy images. This brought me to the fission yeast model organism, s.Pombe, and the fascinating process of mitosis. It occurred to me that the data we were gathering gave sufficient information for modeling purposes, so I started devising a model of chromosome segregation in fission yeast.

Parallel to this, I worked with V. Lobjois and C. Lorenzo, who are know part of the IP3D team at ITAV - a cancer research facility. to build a Selective Plane Imaging Microscope (or SPIM) to study proliferation in 3D cancer cell cultures. In 2008, I spent a semester at Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia as an invited professor in the biophysics group, where I worked on giant unilamellar vesicles sedimentation, taught basic physics to biology and medecine students, and learned Spanish.