Portraits of the UM

With his NEMESIS project, mathematician Daniele Di Pietro has just been awarded 7.8 million euros in ERC Synergy funding. His goal: to overcome the current technological barriers to numerical simulations of complex physical problems. The director of the Alexandre Grothendieck Institute in Montpellier, France, describes his career path in a discipline for which he was not originally destined.

Paul Antonio, a paleomagnetism researcher at the Géosciences Montpellier laboratory, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) grant for his proposal of a new experimental method to refine the dating of the Earth's inner core.

Oriol Amat is Professor of Economics at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, of which he was also Rector. He is considered an expert in financial accounting, management control and corporate fraud. On September 20, the University of Montpellier had the pleasure of awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Erika Burioli works on cancer cells capable of spreading in the environment and infecting foreign organisms. The researcher at the Interactions Hôtes-Pathogènes-Environnements (IHPE) laboratory has been awarded a european research council (ERC) grant in September 2023 to continue her work on bivalves.

With her young team specializing in inflammatory immune mechanisms at the Institut de Génétique Moléculaire de Montpellier (IGMM), Nadine Laguette is multiplying her successes. In ten years, she has made several key discoveries and won no fewer than three prestigious European ERC grants. At the end of 2022, she was awarded the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca de l'Institut de France cancerology prize.  

A world-renowned researcher in the field of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), Michel Bouvier has contributed to numerous fundamental and therapeutic discoveries on these proteins, which are the target of over 30% of drugs on the market. Many Montpellier researchers have trained with this professor from the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Montréal. In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Montpellier.