At MET, Benoit has been collaborating with global and start-up MedTech companies on innovation partnerships and innovation vouchers funded by Enterprise Ireland. For a list of peer-reviewed publications, his ORCID ID can be found using this link https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7948-1796
Benoit joined the Medical and Engineering Technologies in GMIT as a microbiologist in 2017. He studied biology in the University of Rennes I, in France before moving to Ireland in 2001. Most of his professional life has taken place in research centres working as a molecular biologist on multiple high-tech projects focusing on biomarkers discovery.
He was awarded a Science Foundation Ireland fellowship under the Alimentary Glycoscience Research cluster in 2010, with the aim of investigating the host commensal microbes ‘cross-talk’ in the human gut by identification of bacterial adhesins and characterisation of exopolysaccharides using glycosylation-related microarrays. During this project, he had the opportunity to collaborate with a start-up company, which develops probiotic and prebiotic formulas for the biopharmaceutical industry.
He graduated in February 2015 with a PhD from the National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Sciences, under the supervision of Prof Lokesh Joshi from the Glycoscience group in NUI Galway and in collaboration with Prof Fergus Shanahan and Prof Douwe Van Sinderen from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre / Microbiome Institute in University College Cork.
Following his doctorate, he worked in the Biomedical Science department at NUI Galway as a postdoctoral fellow on a 3-year project funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, in association with Teagasc and an industrial partner (Glanbia). The aim was to produce human milk oligosaccharides from lactose found in industrial whey waste. This required the selection and production of safe recombinant glycosyltyransferases sourced from various animal species that he engineered in mammalian cells.
