Our colleague Lionel Dupuy participates in the institutional welcome to new Ikerbasque researchers

On 18 May, president of the Basque Country Iñigo Urkullu welcomed the Ikerbasque researchers joining the ranks in 2020. The event, which was delayed one year due to the pandemic, was attended by our colleague Lionel Dupuy, a biophysics expert specializing in plant-environment interactions.

Dupuy received his doctorate in root-soil mechanics (2004) from the University of Bordeau and has research experience at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), the University of California, Davis (US) and the James Hutton Institute (United Kingdom). He has also received the Wellcome Image award, the Massalski research prize, the Chair Joliot (ESPCI, Paris), and the Consolidator Fellowship (European Research Council).

His work at NEIKER is focused on developing the final phase of the SENSOILS project, an initiative to visualise and characterise the movement of the soil microorganisms that participate in the nitrogen process.

For his study, Dupuy has developed a transparent artificial soil enabling all processes occurring in plant roots to be filmed and visualised, a task that is impossible in conventional soil.

Nitrogen is one of the fundamental elements of plant nutrition and understanding how it moves in the soil and interacts with roots will allow farming systems to be designed to better leverage this component in fertilisers and make them more environmentally-friendly.

IKERBASQUE

Ikerbasque is a foundation created by the Basque government to strengthen the Basque Science System with programmes and actions to attract and support research talent in the Basque Country.