Léa began her academic journey with a Bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences at the Université Paris-Sud. She then pursued a Magistère in Biology at Université Paris-Sud, which included a study abroad experience at the University of Connecticut, USA. Léa went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Fundamental Microbiology from Université Paris-Saclay. She later completed a PhD in Infectiology at Institut Pasteur, Université Paris-Cité in Paris, France, where she utilized cryo-correlative light and electron microscopy to investigate the mechanisms underlying early endomembrane damage caused by the intracellular pathogen Shigella flexneri.

In November 2024, Léa joined the Zeller lab as an EIPOD-LinC postdoctoral fellow, working across the teams of Julia Mahamid at EMBL Heidelberg (main affiliation) and Martin Jechlinger at the MOLIT Institute, Heilbronn. In this interdisciplinary setting, she is exploring bacterial-host crosstalk in the context of colorectal cancer using advanced multi-scale cryo-CLEM pipelines. This allows for imaging of disease models across scales from multicellular systems to molecular-scale analysis of bacteria-host processes by cryo-ET. Together this work aims to provide a mechanistic understanding of disease processes.