Jory Lietard

Jory Lietard is a post-doctoral student in the group of Prof. Mark Somoza, at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, University of Vienna, Austria. He studied organic chemistry and graduated with a Master's degree in Biomolecular Engineering from the Université Montpellier II, France in 2007. He then completed his PhD in Molecular Sciences at the Universität Bern, Switzerland in 2012. He went in 2013 for his first post-doctoral stay at McGill University in Montréal, Canada then joined the University of Vienna in 2015, where he currently works.

His research interests revolves around the chemistry of nucleosides, nucleotides and nucleic acids and their therapeutic applications. Current research topics include the synthesis of high-density RNA and chemically-modified nucleic acid microarrays, and their use in aptamer discovery and optimization, as well as in the identification of substrate preference in enzyme-mediated reactions. He also explores the use of DNA microarrays in the preparation of sequence libraries for DNA nanotechnology and for the storage of digital information on DNA.

He previously worked on the circularization of oligonucleotides in the group of Dr. Jean-Jacques Vasseur as a Master student, and on the synthesis of conformationally-constrained nucleoside analogs in the group of Prof. Christian Leumann as a PhD candidate. His first post-doctoral stay, in the group of Prof. Masad Damha, on the characterization of oligonucleotide arrays by mass spectrometry and on the development of novel methods for oligonucleotide synthesis, was financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. As of 2019, he is the author or co-author of 20 peer-reviewed research articles, patent and book chapters.