Group leader
Antoine Hocher
Antoine is leading the MIMIC (Molecular Innovations in Microbial Interactions and Chromatin) lab in the department of genetics. He has a bachelor in Physics and a Masters in systems biology from the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris, France). He obtained his PhD on yeast heterochromatin silencing in the laboratory of Angela Taddei at Institut Curie in 2017 (Paris, France). He later moved to London to join the lab of Tobias Warnecke (MRC-London Institute of Medical Sciences). His post-doctoral work has focused on the diversity of prokaryotic chromatin systems.
He set up his group in 2024, supported by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award.
Post-Docs
Geoffroy Gaschignard
Dr. Geoffroy Gaschignard is a postdoctoral researcher in the MIMIC Lab, where he has been working since January 2025. He combines bioinformatic analyses with biochemical experiments to study protein families. Geoffroy holds an engineering degree (equivalent to a Master’s) from ESPCI Paris (Paris, France) and a Master’s in Biology (SBCP, Paris, France). He completed his PhD in the BIOMIN team at the IMPMC (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France), where he investigated the function of calcyanin, a novel protein involved in biomineralization in cyanobacteria. Currently, his research focuses on developing a bioinformatics pipeline to detect DNA mimic proteins in sequence databases and experimentally validating their functional mimicry.
Credit Photo : Cecil Duflot (IMPMC, Sorbonne Universite, Paris, France)
Google Scholar
ORCID
Shun-Min Yang
Dr. Shun-Min Yang joined the MIMIC Lab as a postdoctoral Research Associate on September 1, 2025. He is an evolutionary microbiologist with a strong interest in endosymbiosis and host-pathogen interactions.
Shun-Min began his academic journey studying Horticulture for both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. He then worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology, Academia Sinica, where he investigated germline stem cell development in Drosophila.
During his PhD, Shun-Min expanded his expertise to protistology, focusing on the evolution of heme biosynthesis in diatoms. His doctoral research was conducted in Dr. Miroslav Oborník’s laboratory at the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic.
Currently, Shun-Min is exploring novel DNA-mimicking proteins derived from environmental DNA. His work aims to uncover the unknown DNA-mimicking proteins and elucidate the functional roles of these intriguing proteins in microbial systems.
Former Members
2024-2025
Adam Gibbon, Part III student, (Disordered protein in prokaryotes)
Max Perrin, BBSRC rotation student (Evolution of H2AX)
Vidun Wedagedera, Part II student (Evolution of thermophily)
James Sun, Part I, Summer student
Ismail Ahmed, Part I, Summer student
MIMIC LAB 