Marie-Caroline MICHALSKI, Médaille CHEVREUL 2022 (INRAE, Laboratoire CarMeN, Lyon, France)

The CHEVREUL 2022 Medal was awarded on Friday September 23, 2022 to Marie-Caroline MICHALSKI, INRAE Research Director at CarMeN Laboratory in Lyon (France), for the excellence of her scientific work carried out over recent years in the field of Human Nutrition and Lipids. The CHEVREUL conference and the awarding of the CHEVREUL Medal took place during the SFEL/CNIEL Symposium entitled "Dairy Lipids and Health - From the first 1000 days, and beyond..." which took place in Paris Scientific program here. Marie-Caroline Michalski's conference was entitled "Milk fat globules and their polar lipids: a bridging journey from science & technology to nutrition and health", conference available in the replay video below.

Photos de Guillaume Blanchon

Biosketch of Marie-Caroline Michalski presented by Dr Claire Bourlieu-Lacanal (INRAE, Montpellier) Vice President of SFEL

"Dr Marie-Caroline Michalski is Research Director at INRAE and conducts her research at the interface between clinical nutrition and physico-chemistry of lipids in CarMeN Laboratory (Lyon, France). Dr Michalski is head of the DO-IT team ("Diet and food matrix in Obesity and Metabolic diseases: role of Intestinal tract and innovative Therapeutics") which is an Inserm team labelled by the French Foundation for Medical Research, and authored 115 publications and book chapters dealing with lipid science, nutrition, metabolism…

Dr Marie-Caroline Michalski was trained as a Food Science engineer at the Agronomy and Food Science Engineering Grande Ecole, ENSAIA (Nancy) and started "adhering" to lipids during her PhD dealing with the interfacial properties of oils and emulsions, performed under the direction of Pr. J. Hardy. After a postdoctoral stay in Lisbon (Portugal), Dr Michalski was recruited at INRAE as a permanent position of Research Scientist in UMR STLO (Rennes, 1999) - in charge of the new milk/dairy lipids topic – and addressed the question of structure-function (including digestibility) relastionships of the milk fat globule. In 2006, Dr Michalski moved to laboratories in Lyon that later gave birth to the present UMR Cardiovascular Metabolism Diabetes and Nutrition (CarMeN laboratory; working sucessively in a lipidomics team with Prof. M. Lagarde, in a nutrition and metabolism team with Dr H. Vidal, in association with the Human Nutrition Research Center, Pr M. Laville). Her research was mainly focused on the link between "lipid structures and pathophysiology of nutrition-driven diseases" – … Dr Michalski succeeded in the Research Director contest in 2013 and was recently promoted to Senior Research Director in 2022.
Dr Michalski has been involved in several important French National Agency funded projects ANR FLORINFLAM (coord. Dr R. Burcelin), AGECANINOX (coord. Dr C. Genot) and was the project leader of VALOBAB project (milk polar lipids bioactivity and valuing buttermilk), a cornerstone in French dairy lipid research. She co-founded UMT BALI "Bioavailability of Lipids and Intestine" (UMT ACTIA label with ITERG), is an active member of GERLI scientific committee (lipidomics scientific network), GLN (Lipids and Nutrition Group) steering committee, SFEL, a member of AOCS (American Oil Chemists’ Society), EuroFedLipid, SFN (French Society for Nutrition), ASN (American Society for Nutrition), ISSFAL (International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids); awarded with several distinctions…

Notably Marie-Caroline has conducted clinical trials in which she has demonstrated the innovative concept of "slow/fast lipids", i.e. emulsified compared to bulk lipids lead to differential postprandial lipemia in obese and non obese subjects, reinforce beta-oxydation and fatty acid-spillover. She has also shed light on metabolic impacts of milk sphingolipids. She and her group demonstrated in preclinical studies that milk sphingomyelin intestinal residues led to increased mucus layer, modulated microbiota and decreased cholesterol absorption; then in a randomized clinical trial, that the supplementation of patients with milk sphingomyelin could decrease lipid markers of cardiovascular risk.
Marie-Caroline has been the PhD supervisor and has trained several young scientists and has been a perfectionist and dedicated colleague and a source of inspiration, always open to constructive dialogue and welcoming new ideas…"