Talents
& award

On Wednesday 12 October 2022, 35 female researchers will be awarded the Young Talents for Women in Science France 2022 prizes. Among them, Loélia Babin is a researcher who studied in Paris. For a little over a year, she has been living in Toulouse where she continues her research on circular RNA.
Currently, Loélia Babin is a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Fabienne Meggetto in Toulouse. She has been working for more than a year in the Toulouse cancer research centre. But before she got there, the researcher had a long training course behind her. After a first year of medical studies in Paris, she reoriented herself towards a degree in biology at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. She then entered the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, where she completed a master’s degree in biology.
It was during her various internships that Loélia Babin discovered her passion for laboratory research. Her first internship was in laboratory discovery: “That’s when I realised that I really liked laboratory work and research”. She then did internships in oncology, a second internship that confirmed her taste for this scientific field.
It was during her thesis at the Imagine Institute in Paris that she met Dr Fabienne Meggetto, a researcher in Toulouse. “She then suggested that I apply for funding to continue as a post-doctoral fellow with her to work on the continuity of what I had done during my thesis,” recalls the researcher. A proposal that Loélia Babin accepted. She then obtained funding for the post-doctorate and one thing led to another and the researcher then applied for the L’Oréal-Unesco fellowship to continue the work she is currently doing.

“I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to do. Already in high school, we didn’t talk too much about the biology faculty, in general we were directed towards the preparatory courses or medicine. I went into medicine with the idea of doing medical research.