Pascale Daran-Lapujade

Prof. Pascale Daran-Lapujade is a Full Professor at Delft University of Technology’s Faculty of Applied Sciences and Director of the Applied Sciences Graduate School overseeing ~500 PhD candidates. Her research focuses on microbial systems, particularly the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and non-conventional yeasts, aiming to understand how microbes respond to environmental stimuli and engineer them into efficient biocatalysts. Her work integrates quantitative physiology, genomics, and cell biology, with a recent emphasis on synthetic biology to construct yeast platforms enabling rapid metabolic pathway remodelling. This research was supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Research Themes: Central carbon metabolism regulation and uncoupling growth from product formation. Techniques include molecular biology, bioreactor cultivation, transcriptomics, fluorescence microscopy, and collaborations in proteomics/metabolomics. She also leads the ENW-XL proposal on microbial electron control and is a Senior Editor at FEMS Yeast Research.

Advising & Grants: Supervises numerous PhD/MSc students and postdocs. Notable grants include ERC Consolidator and ENW-XL (collaboration with Wageningen/VU). Lab activities emphasize metabolic engineering, pathway swapping, and synthetic chromosome design.

Labs/Teams: Pascale Daran-Lapujade Group, collaborating with international partners (BOKU Vienna, Utrecht, Milan). Key projects include yeast platform development and glycolysis humanization.