I am a CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut des Sciences Analytiques, France, where I am part of the interdisciplinary Biophysics of Complex Systems team.
In my research, I use computer simulations to study how molecules move and interact. This helps understand biological and chemical processes at the atomic scale.
My work sits at the intersection of computational molecular biophysics, physical chemistry, and integrative structural biology. My goal is to understand how the fast, near-random motions of atoms and molecules give rise to function, whether in biological systems or complex chemical assemblies.
To do this, I combine:
- Molecular dynamics simulations to model how molecules behave over time and predict their properties.
- Machine learning to extract patterns from complex simulation data.
- Experimental biophysics to connect my simulations to real-world measurements, thanks to top-notch collaborators in NMR, Cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography.
The systems I study range from short peptides to large molecular machines (myosin, ATP synthase), with the occasional venture into supra-molecular chemistry. I’ve also worked on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, helping to map its conformational dynamics and identify target sites for vaccines. More recently, I started to explore how deep learning can help us integrate experiments with simulations.
If you are a student curious about how molecules work at the atomic scale, and how we can use computers to understand this, I would love to hear from you. Check out our open positions or contact me directly at florian.blanc [at] cnrs [dot] com.
News
- May 4, 2026 — Jung Hwan Ro is starting his internship on lignin characterization by NMR and MD simulations, part of our collaboration with Léa Vilcocq and Hugo Lilti from IRCELYON.
- May 4, 2026 — Open position for a Master’s thesis on enzyme simulations, starting date between September 2026 and March 2027.
- April 27, 2026 — Student-engineers Louison Grizard and Axel Lukaszewicz from CPE Lyon are joining us for a short project on silver-binding peptides.
- March 24–26, 2026 — Invited talk at CECAM Workshop on Cryo-EM in Toulouse.
- February 10, 2026 — New paper published in J. Phys. Chem. Lett.
- February 9, 2026 — Raphael Desrues is starting his Master’s thesis on peptide oligomerization, supervised by myself and Fabien Chirot from Institut Lumière et Matière.