Celine Berthier, Ph.D.

Research Laboratory Specialist

Phone: 734-647-2172
E-Mail: celineb@umich.edu

Providing keywords that motivating Celine's studies long before she entered University, she answers: humans, diseases, and genes.

Celine did her studies at the University of Bordeaux (France), a very famous city for its wines. Living in the part of France where the agronomical research, particularly grape research, is of primary economical importance, she wanted to discover the specific field of research in grape diseases, grape maturation and the molecular biology/biochemistry techniques used. Therefore, Celine did one year of Master's work focusing on the enzyme responsible of the grape berry maturation called polygalacturonase. However, her main interests from the previous years was and still involves human research. From 2002 to 2005, with a background in molecular biology/biochemistry, Celine completed her thesis work in Switzerland in nephrology which immediately became her favorite field. She specifically worked on proteins called matrix metalloproteinases and the implication in kidney chronic rejection after transplantation, as well as in polycystic kidney disease. Collaboration often opens the mind to many very interesting things and opportunities! Wishing to continue working in kidney diseases and gain experience in microarray analyses as well as what can be done from functional genomics, in January 2006 she joined Matthias Kretzler's group, whose lab was newly installed at the University of Michigan.