Valentine Meunier, biologist, aged 28
Hope for the future. The title of her thesis, to be presented in April 2021, may seem daunting: "Interactions between scleractinian corals, microplankton and planktonic diazotrophs". But in it she discusses two major discoveries and has a wild hope: to make corals more resistant to global warming.
Revenge. Valentine passed her baccalaureate with flying colours, almost didn't get into a biology master's programme and... in 2020 won the l'Oréal-Unesco Young Talent Award.
The big blue. At the age of 13, on holiday in Djibouti, she made her first dive at the height of the whale shark breeding season. But it was above all the beauty of the corals, "things that look like stones but are the basis of marine life", that captivated her.
Facing the sea. For the last four years, she has been living in New Caledonia and plans to work in Hawaii, Tahiti or, why not, in a laboratory in northern Germany.