Affiliation: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Inserm U1186 Institut de Cancérologie Gustave Roussy, France

Dr. Pascale Leroy is a research scientist, principal investigator, at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France. She pursued her doctoral work at Institut Pasteur in Paris and received her PhD in molecular genetics from University Paris-XI/Paris-Sud. Her research activities are centered on epithelial cell determination, differentiation and plasticity, and the development of cell culture models for understanding the molecular shift from healthy to dysfunctional and diseased epitheliums. Her current research projects focus on respiratory diseases such as COPD and lung carcinoma, and the molecular links between these 2 diseases. They include Air-liquid Interface (ALI) cell culture models with primary human airway epithelial cells, healthy and diseased, and aim at understanding the cellular and molecular dysregulations to help identify new markers and drug targets for early diagnostics and therapies.