Claire Villette obtained her PhD in plant molecular biology, and later specialized in plant metabolomics, the analysis of small molecules involved in metabolic reactions.
Her focus is non-targeted high-resolution metabolomics, which allows the large-scale analysis of the metabolic content of biological samples, and the identification of compounds involved in specific metabolic processes (for example, disease versus control). She masters liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS), but also mass spectrometry imaging (MSI), which allows the in-situ identification and localization of compounds in intact tissues.
She is active in environmental metabolomics and developed and expertise in the analysis of various sample types from the environment: water, soil, and plants are among them.