JB’s research career started in Peter Grütter‘s lab as a summer intern, where he developed a protocol to etch iridium wires atom-sized points for scanning probe microscopy.
He then trained in theoretical biophysics, evolving in silico non-linear dynamical of biochemical networks and analyzing network motifs improving performance in noisy chemodetection in fluctuating environment with Paul François (now at UdeM) at McGill University.
JB then switched the pencil for the pipette and joined Gene-Wei Li at MIT for a PhD in bacterial genetics and systems biology. There, he discovered that enzymatic pathways have exquisitely conserved expression stoichiometry, found that the paradigm of coupled transcription-translation did not apply universally across bacterial clades, considered expression-to-fitness landscapes of translation factors both experimentally and theoretically, and identified a novel dual gene induction mechanism in Bacillus subtilis‘ stress response.
Transitioning to mammalian regulatory biology, he did a postdoc in genomics pioneer Jay Shendure‘s lab. At UW in Seattle, he worked on creating new multiplex methods to study enhancers with single-cell RNA-seq, ultra-long-range gene regulation, enhancer evolution, and multi-scale profiling of sequence-to-function maps.
The lab started in January 2025 in the department of biochemistry at Université de Montréal. We are hosted in Pavillon Joseph-A-Bombardier.
Outside the lab, JB enjoys spending time with his wife and infant twins, cooking, reading fiction and non-fiction alike, and walking in nature. He is invested in mental health advocacy.
Jean-Benoît Lalanne
Assistant Prof, UdeM Biochemistry, start 2025/01
UW 2020-2024 (Damon Runyon fellow) with Jay Shendure
PhD MIT 2015-2020 (HHMI fellow) with Gene-Wei Li
MSc McGill U, 2012-2014 with Paul François
BSc McGill U, 2009-2012
Lalanne lab: Quantitative genomics of mammalian transcriptional regulation 