
	Quick access : Quick search :

33 years old
Degree in engineering from the Institut des Sciences et Techniques des Aliments de Bordeaux (ISTAB), Ph.D. from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI), specialising in physics and chemistry
Hobbies: basketball, Japanese cuisine

View film on Christelle Lopez (in French)

	Print
	Tip a friend

Home > Join us > Working for INRA > Portraits > Christelle Lopez

Christelle Lopez

Junior scientist receives Young Researcher Award for 2008

(19/09/2008)

© INRA

At 33, Christelle Lopez already has 36 international scientific publications under her belt. A junior scientist at the Joint Research Unit for the Science and Technology of Milk and Eggs at the INRA/Agrocampus Ouest centre in Rennes, under the Science and Process Engineering of Agricultural Products Division, Christelle is a member of several research programmes and is coordinating a major project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) - a duty rarely exercised this early in a young researcher's career!

Career path reflects desire to maintain ties between fundamental and applied research

The "Agilait" project (2007-2010) is financed in equal parts by the ANR and the diary industry (Arilait Recherches - CNIEL*). It brings together the complementary skills of academic researchers (INRA, CNRS, Inserm), dairy professionals, and technical centres. Christelle's career has been marked by this constant quest for a link beween fundamental and applied research. "My goal," she says, "is to work in fundamental research while maintaining a close relationship with the dairy industry to address their concerns." Applying this principle from the very start, she alternated stints in public and private research circles: an engineering school internship in a Belgian brewery to develop cheese, a second one at INRA-Nantes on milk emulsions, followed by a thesis on the crystallisation properties of milk lipids conducted at a CNRS research unit, with co-funding from the French National Agency for Technical Research (ANRT) and the dairy industry (Arilait Recherches). Christelle then worked as a research engineer in an industrial research centre for two years before being recruited by INRA in 2003 for the "Science and technology of milk and eggs" unit in Rennes.

Fundamental research on the properties of milk lipids to improve the nutritional quality of dairy products

To meet nutritional requirements, the "Agilait" project sought to find a natural way of increasing the level of unsaturated fatty acids and antioxidants in milk, by changing the diets of cows and then studying the consequences on the properties of lipids and dairy products: composition, structure, point of fusion, oxidability, nutritional quality, digestibility, etc. Christelle is well-equipped to study all these aspects, thanks to the knowledge she patiently accumulated over 10 years as well as the innovative methods she developed to study the structure and properties of milk lipids. With 400 types of fatty acids, milk fat is the most complex fat in nature. Its sensorial, functional and nutritional properties depend not only on its composition but also its structure. In unprocessed cow's milk, lipids are organised in globules surrounded by a phospholipid-rich membrane from mammary cells. However, in the dairy products we consume, these globules are more or less altered depending on the technological processes used. While they are relatively well-preserved in camembert, they become smaller, protein-encased droplets in milk and yoghurt, and explose in emmenthal, forming lipid pools that contribute to the "thread-like" characteristic of this cheese. Milk lipid structure thus has an influence on the texture and functional properties of products. It also affects their nutritional properties, particularly the kinetics of digestion and, as a result, their metabolic fate.
By using confocal microscopy, Christelle has developed an innovative method to analyse the structure of fat globules in situ in complex products such as milk and cheese. This allows her to follow the stages of breakdown during a manufacturing process. She can also locate phospholipids, bacteria and any other relevant component in dairy products for her research work.
Christelle is also interested in process development, and uses the technical platform at the Rennes unit with her collaborators to fractionate and purify fat globules of different sizes, as well as the globule's membrane phospholipids, which have interesting nutritional and functional properties.

"In my career," she said, "my encounter with Michel Ollivon, a research director at CNRS-Châteney-Malabry, was a turning point. Under his tutelage, while working on my thesis, I learned techniques for the observation of lipid crystals, another fascinating property that affects, for example, the texture of butter." The work she conducted in collaboration with Michel Ollivon won Christelle an award from the "Association Française de Calorimétrie et d'Analyse Thermique" in June 2008.

A promising research project of international stature

These innovative methods have given Christelle and her team a wealth of potential collaborations, both with the industry and with the French and international academic community.
She has been invited to international congresses in China and Australia (2006), and Greece and Mexico (2008), a sign of peer recognition of the scientific quality of her work.
Christelle now coordinates lipid research within the unit. She has participated in directing 5 theses, including 3 ongoing ones. She also teaches graduate-level research classes and holds training courses for the dairy industry.
Persuaded that openness is necessary in scientific exchanges, Christelle is an active participant in the creation of a network to combine the complementary skills of researchers, industry members and technical centres in the field of food lipids (meat, egg, fish, plant, dairy) – an approach with a promising future, one that has already shown its worth as embodied by Christelle's success at such a young age.

*Created in 1990, Arilait Recherches SA is a research company tasked with conducting research for the French dairy industry. It is a subsidiary of CNIEL, the Centre National Interprofessionnel de l’Economie Laitière.