I am a CNRS Research Scientist in the Biophysics of Complex Systems team at Institut des Sciences Analytiques, France. I study how molecules move with computer simulations.
My research falls under computational molecular biophysics, physical chemistry, and integrative structural biology.
My motivation is to understand how biomolecular function emerges from structural dynamics by describing the atomically-detailed mechanisms involved. For this, I combine molecular dynamics simulations, machine learning, and experimental biophysics.
I investigate complex molecular mechanisms in systems ranging from short peptides to large molecular motors (myosin, ATP synthase), with the occasional venture into supra-molecular chemistry. I also contributed to characterizing the conformational dynamics and immunogenic sites of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. More recently, I started to explore how to apply deep learning methods to the analysis of biophysical experiments.
I am always looking for motivated students to work with, so check out the open positions or contact me directly at florian.blanc [at] cnrs [dot] com.
News
- May 4, 2026 — We have an open position for a Master’s thesis. Starting date flexible 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 jointly by myself and Fabien Chirot from Institut Lumière et Matière.