Gwenaël Piganeau is a Research Director at CNRS and leader of the “Evolutionary and Environmental Genomics of Phytoplankton group”. She  obtained her PhD in Biometry from the university of Lyon 2001, and spent three years as a postdoc in the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, where she contributed to the field of molecular evolution and population genetics. Her  general research interests concern the mechanisms of genome evolution in the smallest photosynthetic eukaryotes. She is using and adapting bioinformatic tools to address following issue : What can sequence data (in a broad sense, from complete genomes to metagenomes) tell us about the lifestyle, life-cycle and life history of an organism? This is particulary relevant for planktonic species, as their genome analysis is the only information that can be gained into their diversity and lifestyle.