Abdou Rachid Thiam was born and raised in Senegal. Following his undergraduate studies at ESPCI Paris, he obtained a PhD in 2010 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris VI for his work on the properties of emulsions using microfluidic technology, in the group of Jérôme Bibette. Abdou Rachid then moved to Yale University for a postdoc, funded by a Marie Curie Fellowship, where he worked with James Rothman, as well as Frederic Pincet and Tobias Walther, to reconstitute and study intracellular vesicle trafficking with emulsion droplets. He then became a group leader at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, where he now also chairs the Biophysics Research Axis. His Biological Emulsions lab combines membrane biophysics and emulsion science with cell biology to understand organelle dynamics, with a special focus on the formation and functionalisation mechanisms of lipid droplets. Abdou Rachid is the winner of the Claude Paoletti Prize (2018), the CNRS bronze medal (2020), as well as the Biophysical Society's Thomas E. Thompson Award (2022).