I am a Director of Research at the MMG center and the head of the department “Development and Pathophysiology of the Cardiovascular System (DevCard)”. I am currently nucleus member of the working group Development, Anatomy and Pathology from the ESC. I received my Ph.D. in Cell Biology in 1997 from Aix Marseille University, for my work on the formation of the heart in the fruitfly Drosophila. I did my postdoctoral training at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, NY, USA from 1997 to 2001. In 2001 I joined the lab of Margaret Buckingham at the Pasteur Institute, where I have participated to the discovery of the second heart field in the mammalian heart. In 2002, I have obtained a tenure position as young researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). I was promoted to Director of Research in 2009 at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM). My main interest is to understand how gene regulatory networks regulate the second