20 March 2025 – Gaëlle Legube emphasizes the pivotal role that EMBO has played throughout her career. Starting with an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship and later continuing with the EMBO Young Investigator Programme, Legube found invaluable support in the “human-centred” support system provided by EMBO.
“The organization’s responsive environment fosters a conducive research atmosphere,” she says. Legube sees networking, funding for lab retreats or childcare grants as examples of the essential support EMBO provides to the individual researcher. “These complement the major research funding sources like ERC grants that are more focused on the research, and less on the researcher,” she says.
Legube encourages early career researchers to pursue the EMBO Programmes for support in their careers in the life sciences. “Academia offers a lot of flexibility in everyday life. For example, is it possible to combine both scientific research and family life? Probably even more so than in many other professions,” Legube says.
Her research is also human-centric and aims to understand how cells detect and repair DNA double-strand break which if left unaddressed can lead to chromosomal rearrangements and oncogenesis, potentially resulting in cancer. Legube emphasizes the broader impact of her work on public health, particularly in understanding genome instability linked to cancer, aging and neurodegenerative diseases. “We work to improve public health knowledge, thus serving society,” Legube says.
