Didier Stien
Career
Dr Didier Stien obtained a PhD in Chemistry (1997) at Marseilles University under the co-supervision of Profs. Michèle Bertrand and David Crich working on the design of chiral auxiliaries to control diastereoselectivity in radical cyclizations. Next he worked at the Pennsylvania State University under the supervision of Prof. Steven Weinreb where he conducted the first total synthesis of marine alkaloid agelastatin A. Didier Stien was then hired as a research fellow at CNRS (1999), working at the University of Montpellier and then at the CNRS research center in French Guiana and at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles. Since his stay in French Guiana, he has been developing natural product research inspired by the observation of networks of species. This includes bio-guided isolation and structure elucidation, but also chemical profiling, metabolomic studies of active natural or synthetic mixtures, chemical ecology. He studied some traditional pharmacopeia in Amazonia and developed a tool to quantify the information related to traditional remedies, he investigated on the natural defenses of plants (including woods), and he got interested in the microbial symbiotes of plants and insects, searching for natural and innovative active compounds, with a focus on antimicrobial agents.
At the Observatoire Océanologique de Banyuls – Sorbonne Université since 2013, Didier Stien is now currently leading research on the search of innovative antibacterial agents from Posidonia oceanica endophytes within the framework of the ANR-Swiss National Fund SECIL project. More generally, he studies bacterial and fungal symbiotes of marine organisms such as plants, algae, or sponges in search of innovative active natural products. He is also interested in the microbial communication systems in the sea and in the way algae can escape from viral infections. More recently, he got interested in the toxicity and fate of emerging pollutants as well. This includes the search of toxicity markers in marine organisms and the search of biotransformation products of the tested pollutants.
He is expert in structural determination by NMR and will gladly help anyone interested in determining the structure of an unknown natural product.
Didier Stien is author of 107 publications in peer-reviewed journals, 9 books or book chapters, and 6 patents.