Catherine BEAL

Microorganisms play a crucial role on the earth, many of them being essential to obtain fermented products such as foods, biomolecules for chemical and pharmaceutical industries, or bioenergy. I focused my education and professional experience to investigate the relationships between the microorganisms, their environment and the processes that involve them. After obtaining an Engineer’s degree in Biological engineering (Technical University of Compiègne, 1985), I started working at Biocom society for one year, and joined the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon (now AgroParisTech) in 1986 as an assistant professor in Biotechnology. I received a Ph.D. degree in Biotechnology (AgroParisTech, 1991) on a thesis entitled “contribution to the monitoring and control of mixed cultures of lactic bacteria”. I became associate professor in 1991 and spent a 9-month sabbatical at Wageningen University (NL) in 1994. I obtained my accreditation to supervise research in 1998. Since 2002, I’m full professor in biochemical engineering at AgroParisTech. My teachings concern microbiology, advanced fermentation, bioprocesses and biochemical engineering, mainly for students of the engineering schools AgroParisTech and CentraleSupélec and for MSc students of Paris-Saclay University. My research focuses on the understanding of the responses of microorganisms to stress conditions they encounter in their environment and during the processes there are involved. I established methods to characterize the biological and physiological responses of microorganisms during their production by fermentation and their stabilisation and I developed scientific approaches to adapt the microbial cells to different stress, by applying a moderate stress before the real stress, thus helping them to overcome these stress. I’m interested in various study models such as lactic acid starter production, probiotic starter applications, organic acid, enzymes and aroma compounds bioproduction. I have published 60 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 11 book chapters, 1 patent and 2 software. My research received a h-factor index of 29 (Google scholar, December 2021). I currently supervise 2 Ph.D. students and have supervised 15 Ph.D. students who obtained their degree, and 4 post-doc researchers.