Abdou Rachid Thiam

Abdou Rachid Thiam is a Senegalese biophysicist and research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France (UMR 8023), where he studies physical mechanisms regulating the dynamics of lipid droplets in cells and in vitro.

Education and career

Thiam earned a Bachelor of Science from ESPCI Paris before conducting his doctoral research at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris on the stability of emulsions using microfluidics.

After his PhD, he moved to Yale University in 2012 with a Marie Curie fellowship to conduct postdoctoral research in the team of Nobel prize Laureate James E. Rothman, before starting his own research group at CNRS in 2014. In 2024 he co-founded Oria Bioscience, a biotechnology startup company focused on applying advances in cell biology and biophysics to drug development and pharmaceutical innovation.

Research contributions In his early research, Thiam examined the stability and interfacial properties of emulsions using microfluidic techniques. In his subsequent research, he has examined how lipid droplets form from cellular membranes and how their physical properties influence their behavior and interactions within cells. In particular, lipid droplets originate from the endoplasmic reticulum and are governed by interfacial properties such as surface tension and membrane composition, which affect their formation and morphology.

He also uses simplified and reconstituted experimental systems to model intracellular processes, enabling quantitative analysis of membrane behavior and lipid droplet dynamics under controlled physical conditions.

Awards and recognition Abdou Rachid Thiam was awarded the :fr:Prix Claude-Paoletti from the CNRS in 2018, a CNRS Bronze medal in 2020, and the Thomas E. Thompson Award from the Biophysical Society in 2022. He was awarded the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences in 2025, a European scientific prize recognizing outstanding contributions in biomedical research.

Highly cited papers as an independent researcher M'barek KR, Ajjaji D, Chorlay A, Vanni S, Forêt L, Thiam AR. ER membrane phospholipids and surface tension control cellular lipid droplet formation. Developmental Cell. 2017 41(6):591-604. (Cited 296 times as of 2026, according to Google Scholar. )