Publications
CV
R'MES

Welcome to the home page of

Sophie Schbath



Unit MaIAGE -- INRAE campus
78352 Jouy-en-Josas, France
Sophie.Schbath at inrae.fr

Short bio
I got a PhD thesis in Statistics from the University of Paris V on October 25, 1995. I made my thesis in the Biometrics laboratory of INRA (French National Institute for Agronomic Research, now INRAE) at Jouy-en-Josas, in which I obtained a permanent position of researcher in August 1996. In 1996, I was a one-year post-doctoral fellow at Los Angeles, in the team of Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman. In 2000, I moved into the new multidisciplinary laboratory MIG (Mathematics, Informatics & Genome, now MaIAGE ) at INRA-Jouy. I defended my habilitation on September 22, 2003 and became Director of Research at INRAE in 2006. I was the president of the French Society of BioInformatics (300 members) from 2010 to 2016 and co-headed the French Research Group "Molecular BioInformatics" (1000 members) from 2006 to 2014. I was the head of the MaIAGE lab, from 2012 to 2022.
Presently, I have been the scientific head of the bioinformatics facility Migale since 2016.

Research area
My main interest is to develop statistical methods for genome and metagenome analysis. My favorite objects are DNA motifs in all their forms: words, kmers, degenerated words, structured motifs, position weight matrices, maximum exact matchs, etc. I mainly study their frequency but also their locations along genomes, in particular looking for co-located motifs. I have initiated and have been involved in the development of the R'MES software which evaluates the statistical significance of motif counts in DNA sequences.
From these last years, I have been particularly interested in studying microbial ecosystems with my lab.
August 8, 2023.