Corentin DOURMAP is PhD student at iEES Paris. Last March 19th he participated in the final contest of Alliance Sorbonne Université of the Ma Thèse en 180 secondes contest (MT180). He has been able to describe simply his PhD project which consist in studying the seed development. He used a metaphor to be understood by general public: the building of a shelving unit. Watch the video of his performance.
Key-words : Plants, popularization, MT180, Seeds, Nitrogen, Proline, Arabidopsis thaliana
Organized by the CNRS and the Conference of Presidents of Universities (CPU), Ma Thèse en 180 secondes is an international contest of scientific popularization. For PhD students and young doctors, this contest is the opportunity to explain their research subject, its concerns, results and potential applications to general public. Participants have only 3 minutes to do it that is to say 180 seconds and no one more !
The final contest of Alliance Sorbonne Université assemble Sorbonne Université, the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle and the Université de Technologie de Compiègne. It took place on Friday, March 19th, 2021 in the international center of conference of Sorbonne Université. This final contest was qualifying for the national semi-final. The 18 selected candidates have tried to convince the jury composed by businessman, journalists and researchers.
Corentin DOURMAP is a PhD student in the team Adaptations of Plants to Environmental Pressure in iEES Paris. During this contest he could popularize his works. Corentin DOURMAP is studying the seed development in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and particularly the involvement of proline metabolism and nitrogen metabolism in this process. He has been able to explain his subject with an analogy of seed development with the building of a shelving unit kit. The problematic of Corentin DOURMAP is to understand the role of a gene in the seed development. Indeed, when this gene is absent, the seed is abnormally developed. During the three minutes of his speech, he described some results and described the methods used to solve this enigma. Eventually, he demonstrated the importance of his research work in the current context: to supply enough food for a world growing population and to limit some negative impact of the agriculture on the ecosystems. You can watch again the performance of Corentin DOURMAP in this contest from the 56th minute :
Contact
DOURMAP Corentin, PhD
