Aurore Valfort, M.Sc.

Aurore-Cecile Valfort is a Research Assistant Scientist in the Department of Pharmacodynamics. She graduated a B.Sc. in biochemistry from University Claude Bernard (Lyon, France) in 2007, then a M.Sc. in Biotechnology from University Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France) in 2009.

During her M.Sc., she did an internship at the Biotechnology Research Institute in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) where she worked on engineering lentiviral vector with different envelop proteins. After graduating she studied retrotransposon biology as a Research Engineer at the French National Institute for health and Medical Research (INSERM). From 2010 to 2017 she worked at the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS). She studied the 1st mitotic spindle division among 42 nematode species and the identification of new genes involved in the synaptic assembly and scaffold at the Neuro-Muscular Junction (NMJ) in C. elegans. For both project, she worked on the development of new genome engineering methods and successfully used CRISPR/Cas-9 technology for the modification of genes of interest and site-directed mutagenesis. She then joined Dr. Flaveny’s team at Saint Louis University School of Medicine in 2017, where she began to study nuclear receptor. She then joined Dr. Burris at Washington University in Saint Louis, whose lab moved to University of Florida (Genetics Institute) in 2021. Aurore-Cecile Valfort focuses on the development of new cell-based assay for drug discovery purpose. Her goal is to screen new small molecules targeting nuclear receptors for the treatment of several metabolic diseases such as diabetes, obesity Alzheimer disease. Her work was published in multiple scientific articles and presented during several scientific meetings.