CV

Work experience

Postdoctoral researcher at MIGEVEC (IRD), Mar. 2026 – present
- How placental malaria reshapes the transcriptional landscape of fetal cord-blood monocytes
- Integrated multi-omics workflow (scRNA-seq/multiome, spatial transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics)
- Reproducible R/Quarto analyses of a 58,000-cell multiome dataset (Seurat v5, SingleR)
PhD student at Laboratoire Génome et Développement des Plantes (CNRS), Oct. 2022 – Nov. 2025
- Annotation-free pipeline (Python, R, Bash, SLURM) screening 418 plant and 1,081 fungal genomes
- 22 high-confidence inter-kingdom transfers, 21 of them from fungi to plants
- A plant-derived DNA transposon that invaded a powdery mildew fungus and expanded to 172 MITE copies
- First-author review in The Plant Cell (2025) and first-author preprint (2026)
- MSc intern co-supervision and teaching
Intern at Institut Sophia Agrobiotech (INRAE / CNRS / Univ. Côte d’Azur), Jan. – June 2022
- Study of structural variants in plant-parasitic nematode genomes
- Development of a pipeline and use of tools under SLURM cluster
- Programming and scripting under Bash mainly
Intern at Centre Méditerranéen de Médecine Moléculaire (INSERM), Feb. – July 2021
- Bioinformatics analysis of leukemic cells by single-cell RNAseq approach
- Programming and use of packages under R and Python (Seurat, SCENIC, Monocle…)
- Mini-project of drug repositioning with CMap on SARS-CoV-2 (co-first author)

PhD in Biology, Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, 2025
MSc in Life Sciences – Biology, Computer Science & Mathematics track (with honours), Université Côte d’Azur, 2022
BSc in Life Sciences – Bioinformatics track, Université Côte d’Azur, 2020
TULIP Summer School on Integrative Biology and Ecology, July 2023

Programming: Python (pandas, scikit-learn), R (tidyverse, ggplot2, Quarto), Bash, SQL
Workflows/HPC: Nextflow, Snakemake, Docker/Singularity, Git, SLURM
Single-cell & spatial: Seurat v5, SingleR, Monocle 3, SCENIC, Squidpy, cell2location
Genomics/phylogenomics: BWA-MEM2, Minimap2, DIAMOND, BEDTools, MAFFT, IQ-TREE 2, AUGUSTUS
Statistics & ML: GLM, survival analysis, Bayesian statistics, random forest

Asymmetric inter-kingdom gene transfer and a horizontal transposon invasion in a powdery mildew fungus Preprint
Mariault L., Lasserre E., Qian J., Hwang J-H., Kim K.D., Gibert A., Kusch S., Panstruga R., El Baidouri M.
bioRxiv preprint, posted October 16, 2026
A cryptic hybrid zone reveals the genomic basis of flower colour variation in a plant with a large and complex genome Preprint
Salvado P., Gibert A., Chaib S., Raviglione D., Bertrand C., El Baidouri M., Mariault L., Llauro C., Cravero C., Dufau I., Marande W., Carpentier M-C., Martin M., Quelennec C., Gaultier P., Lewin J-M., Aymerich P., Hinoux V., Bertrand J.A.M.
bioRxiv preprint, posted February 2, 2026
Mechanisms, Detection, and Impact of Horizontal Gene Transfer in Plant Functional Evolution
Lee Mariault, Camille Puginier, Jean Keller, Moaine El Baidouri, Pierre-Marc Delaux
The Plant Cell, 2025
Identification of potentially anti-COVID-19 active drugs using the connectivity MAP
Raphaël Bonnet*, Lee Mariault*, Jean-François Peyron (* co-first authors)
PLOS One, 2022

Co-supervision of an MSc intern
Mentoring, Laboratoire Génome et Développement des Plantes (LGDP), Perpignan, Jan. – June 2025
Computing applied to Biology
Undergraduate practical work (2nd-year BSc), 12 h, Université de Perpignan via Domitia, Biology Bachelor, 2025
Introduction to R for scientists
Undergraduate practical work (1st-year BSc), 27 h, Université de Perpignan via Domitia, Biology Bachelor, 2025
Statistics tutoring
Undergraduate tutoring (1st-year BSc), 6 h, Université Côte d'Azur, Biology Bachelor, 2021

Author and volunteer reviewer, bioinfo-fr.net, a French-language bioinformatics blog for a general audience (2025 – present)
IT manager of the PhD students association (UPVDoc) of the University of Perpignan (2022-2023)
Doctoral and post-doctoral students’ representative on the Laboratory Council (2023-2025)
Doctoral students’ representative on the doctoral school board (2023-2025)
Scientific mediation workshop “DNA in all its states” at the science festival of Perpignan (Oct. 2022)
DECLICS Ambassador : Scientific outreach for high school students (Nov. 2023)
Scientific mediation workshop “PlantAdapt” at the science festival of Perpignan (Oct. 2024)