Portraits of theUM

Jean-Philippe Pin, a research director at the Institute of Functional Genomics (IGF) in Montpellier, was awarded the Lamonica Prize this year; his career in molecular pharmacology is opening up new therapeutic avenues for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Straddling the fields of psychiatry and molecular biology, Raoul Belzeaux, a professor at the University of Montpellier (PUPH) and psychiatrist at the Montpellier University Hospital, focuses on biomarkers of mental disorders. The researcher has just received the Marcel Dassault Prize for his project on rapid testing for bipolar disorder.

With one foot in evolutionary genomics and the other in bioinformatics, Anna-Sophie Fiston-Lavier of the Montpellier Institute of Evolutionary Sciences (ISEM) examines genomes in search of repetitive elements that can influence species adaptation. She advocates for bioinformatics as a scientific discipline in its own right.

She has revolutionized chemistry by combining it with ecology. Claude Grison has just been awarded the 2022 European Inventor Award in the “Research” category by the European Patent Office. Here’s a look back at the career of the director of the ChimEco laboratory, for whom dialogue and interdisciplinarity are the keys to innovation.

Under the patronage of Alexandre Viala, professor of public law at theUM, the University of Montpellier had the honor and pleasure of welcoming Belgian scholar François Ost to confer upon him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa. Here is a profile of this legal scholar and philosopher of law who excels in the art of narrating the law to better understand it.

Julie Josse, a statistician and researcher at Inria, joined the Desbrest Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (IDESP) in January 2021. As a specialist in missing data, she has been applying statistical power to the field of health for nearly ten years.