Caroline Bissardon, ESRF user, wins the L’Oréal UNESCO Women in Science award

Caroline Bissardon, ESRF user, wins the L’Oréal UNESCO Women in Science award

Caroline Bissardon is one of the recipients of the L’Oréal UNESCO Women in Science awards this year. At 25, she is researching the unexplored role of selenium in cartilage as the subject of her PhD and has used the ESRF extensively.

Oestoarthritis is a joint disease affecting 43.4 million people worldwide and that results from breakdown of joint cartilage. Research has shown that a too low amount of selenium in the body can be an onset of this disease and influence the possibilities of contraction of this disease in life. However, too much selenium can also be harmful.

Caroline Bissardon, a PhD student at the Institut des Sciences de la Terre in the Université Grenoble-Alpes (UGA/CNRS/IRD/USMB/IFSTTAR, OSUG) and the Centre for NanoHealth in the University of Swansea in Wales (UK), is trying to find out the impact of this element in cartilage from the biochemical, biological and biomechanical point of view. The ultimate goal is to improve the treatment of oestoarthritis and to learn more about tissue regeneration. Her research is based, to a great extent, on work done at the ESRF on ID16A and the French beamline FAME. She used different techniques, such as X-ray Fluorescence Microscopy, X-ray spectroscopy (XANES) and infrared microscopy (FTIR).