Agathe Urvoas is professor of biochemistry at Paris-Saclay university and group leader at the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC). After her PhD at CEA Saclay and a post-doctoral position at Pasteur Institute Paris, she joined Paris-Sud university as a lecturer in Philippe Minard’s “Protein Engineering and Modeling” team in 2005.

Her research projects have been focused on engineering protein scaffolds via directed evolution approaches for the selection of specific binders against chosen targets. A new family of artificial repeat proteins named alphaRep, has been designed and validated with various applications in structural biology, cellular biology, chemistry and nanomaterials. Since 2022, she has been involved in the creation of a new I2BC core facility dedicated to the selection of binders against any protein targets of interest. She now aims at enlarging the functional diversity of artificial proteins.