Marie-Caroline Michalski is Research Director at INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment) and leads the DO-IT research team at the CarMeN laboratory in Lyon, France. Her research explores how the structure of foods, beyond their nutrient composition, influences metabolism and health. A pioneer in the field of food structure and lipid nutrition, she has demonstrated that the metabolic fate of dietary fats depends on their supramolecular organization, leading to the concept of “fast versus slow fat” and advancing understanding of how food matrices affect cardiometabolic health. Her work also contributed to identifying beneficial effects of milk polar lipids on cardiovascular risk factors in humans.

Bridging food science, nutrition, and clinical research, she develops translational approaches to better understand how food design can support disease prevention and human health. She has led numerous publicly and privately funded research programs and has received several distinctions, including the Chevreul Medal (French Society for the Study of Lipids, 2022) and the Ralph Holman Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Oil Chemists’ Society (2024). Her work (>150 publications) has been widely published in leading nutrition and metabolism journals.