Cécile started her scientific journey at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest in France but missed studying the languages she had enjoyed so much as a pupil, so decided to move to the UK to take a course in Medicinal Chemistry at Kingston University. A 1-year industry placement SmithKline Beecham as a sandwich student using NMR spectroscopy to look at peptide conformation (liquid state) and drug polymorphism (solid-state) and convinced her she wasn’t done with studying science, or living in England. Thus she started a PhD in the School of Chemistry at the University of East Anglia with Professor Geoffrey Moore, studying the structure, interactions and folding of a small 10 kDa protein by NMR spectroscopy.
After post-doctoral work in biochemical production of proteins at the University of East Anglia, Norwich and molecular biology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada), she obtained a position as Logisticienne de Recherche RMN in the Départment de Chimie of the Université Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). She returned to the UK where she decided the grass was greener, to the University of Birmingham in 2015 where she heads the School of Chemistry’s NMR facility.