{"id":170616,"date":"2025-07-29T16:40:02","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T22:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tecscience.tec.mx\/en\/?p=170616"},"modified":"2025-08-06T15:21:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T21:21:12","slug":"marion-brunck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tecscience.tec.mx\/en\/health\/marion-brunck\/","title":{"rendered":"Marion Brunck: The Researcher Studying What Nearly Cost Her Mother\u2019s Life \u2014 And A Promising Figure In Immunology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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When she was a child in Avignon, in southern France, Marion Brunck imagined that a scientist was, by necessity, an older, white man with an impeccable lab coat, looking through a microscope. Perhaps, for some girls, that image might have limited their curiosity about research, but not for her. “I never had that barrier in my mind,” says the researcher while describing the fascination she felt for scientific discoveries and laboratories. When she was 12 years old, she received a microscope for Christmas and spent hours in the garden, collecting leaves, rummaging in the dirt, and preparing samples to observe. “That image of what I was at 12 years old aligns more with my current idea of a scientist: someone who gets their hands dirty working.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to that hard work, this year, two organizations have recognized the researcher from Tec’s Institute for Obesity Research<\/a>. First, by the Society for Leukocyte Biology<\/a> for Excellence in Leukocyte Biology and, more recently, the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS) <\/a>distinguished her as one of the 15 emerging stars in her field.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Marion Brunck as a little girl. She grew up in Avignon, in the south of France. She recalls that at age 12, she used to play with a microscope \u2014 a toy she received for Christmas. (Photo: Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What does this recognition mean to you?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s amazing because I competed with people all over the world for this prize. In the case of the International Union of Immunological Societies, there are only 15 awardees, and we are only two from Latin America. I’ve been working really hard since I arrived in Mexico. I was coming from Australia, where I studied for my PhD and post-doc, and there are clear differences in terms of infrastructure and funding. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to recognize the quality of the work that is being done in the global south.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is it to share these ideas with other researchers at conferences and environments like the IUIS, the largest immunology conference that brings together 3,000 people?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of the prize, we are given a session at primetime during the conference in Vienna in August. There, we will have an opportunity to share what we\u2019re doing in Latin America. People think we don’t have the same capacities, funding, but we do have human resources and a lot of grit and we can make things happen. I’m presenting just after Yasmin Belkaid, the director of the Pasteur Institute. She’s going to see my talk. So it’s a mix of excitement and a little bit of nervousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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