Jean-Léon Maître leads the team Mechanics of mammalian development at the Institut Curie since 2016. Jean-Léon Maître completed his PhD work on the mechanics of cell adhesion during zebrafish gastrulation with Prof Carl-Philipp Heisenberg at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology in Dresden and Genetics and then at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria In Klosterneuburg. He then pioneered the mechanical analysis of mouse preimplantation development together with Dr Takashi Hiiragi at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. Since then, the lab of Jean-Léon Maître uses microscopy, genetics and biophysics tools to understand the forces controlling the early development of mammals, including humans.