Sophie Schbath obtained her PhD in Statistics from the University of Paris V in October 1995. She completed her thesis at the Biometrics Laboratory of INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) in Jouy-en-Josas, where she obtained a permanent research position in August 1996. In 1996, she spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow in Los Angeles, working with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman. In 2000, she joined the new multidisciplinary MIG (Mathematics, Informatics & Genome) laboratory at INRA-Jouy, and received her habilitation on September 22, 2003. Sophie Schbath was president of the Société Française de BioInformatique (300 members) from 2010 to 2016, and co-directed the Groupement de Recherche Français “BioInformatique Moléculaire” (1000 members) from 2006 to 2014. She is now a research director at INRAE. Since 2015, she has been head of the MaIAGE laboratory. She is also the scientific leader of the Migale bioinformatics facility. Her main interest is in developing statistical methods for genome and metagenome analysis. Her favorite objects are DNA motifs in all their forms: words, kmers, degenerate words, structured motifs, position weight matrices, exact maximum matches, etc. She studies not only their frequency, but also their location along genomes, looking in particular for co-localized motifs. She mainly studies their frequency, but also their localization along genomes, looking in particular for co-localized motifs. She initiated and participated in the development of the R'MES software, which evaluates the statistical significance of the number of motifs in DNA sequences. In recent years, she has taken a particular interest in the study of microbial ecosystems in her laboratory.