Portraits of the UM

On the recommendation of Montpellier professor Eric Delaporte, director of the TransVIHMI international joint unit, the University of Montpellier awarded Jean-Jacques Muyembe an honorary doctorate on December 9.

On Friday December 2, the University of Montpellier honored Canada by awarding honorary doctorates to Quebec professors Yves Bergeron and Yves Mauffette. It was an opportunity for President Philippe Augé to recall the valuable partnerships that unite the UM not only with the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Université du Québec en Abitbi-Témiscamingue (UQAT), but also with the universities of Laval and Sherbrooke.

Jean-Philippe Pin, Director of Research at Montpellier's Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle (IGF), won this year's Lamonica award for his career in molecular pharmacology, which has opened up new therapeutic avenues for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Straddling psychiatry and molecular biology, Raoul Belzeaux, PUPH and psychiatrist at Montpellier University Hospital, is interested in biomarkers of mental disorders. He has just been awarded the Marcel Dassault prize for his project to develop a rapid test for bipolar disorders.

With one foot in evolutionary genomics and the other in bioinformatics, Anna-Sophie Fiston-Lavier of Montpellier's Institut des sciences de l'évolution (Isem) scans genomes in search of repeated elements capable of influencing species adaptation. She promotes bioinformatics as a scientific discipline in its own right.

She has revolutionized chemistry, making it an ecologically sound business. Claude Grison has just been awarded the European Inventor 2022 prize in the "Research" category by the European Patent Office. A look back at the career of the director of the ChimEco laboratory, for whom dialogue and transdisciplinarity are the keys to innovation.