In November 2023 she was awarded, along with four other laureates, the Irène Joliot-Curie “Young Woman Scientist of the Year” prize by the French Academy of Sciences. Several months earlier, with an international team, she had succeeded in developing the very first experimental structure of a human olfactory receptor.
She started her career by a training in flavor science and industry at the ISIPCA in Versailles and an industry experience as a sensory analyst in the Bel group. Attracted by understanding the mechanisms involved in the sense of smell, she decided to reorient towards academic research in 2012.
De March got her Ph.D. in 2015 in computational chemistry at Université Côte d’Azur (FR) where she investigated the molecular mechanisms involved in odorant receptor recognition of odorant molecules thanks to molecular modelling protocols.
In 2016, she joined the Matsunami lab at Duke University (NC, USA) to continue studying how odorant receptors are used to trigger an odor percept but on the bench side.
In spring 2022, she obtained a permanent position as CNRS Assistant professor and joined in December 2022 the Department of Analytical and Structural Chemistry and Biology at the Institute of Chemistry of Natural Substances.
