-Emmanuelle Charpentier-

An European SCIENTIST who is the Best at Co-founding

Biotech Companies

Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier (born 11 December 1968) is a French

professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics and biochemistry.[1]
Since 2015, she has been a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection
Biology.

Education

Born in 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge in France, Charpentier studied

biochemistry, microbiology and genetics at the Pierre and Marie Curie
University (today the Faculty of Science of Sorbonne University) in Paris.[2]
She was a graduate student at the Institut Pasteur from 1992 to 1995, and
was awarded a research doctorate.

Career and research

Charpentier worked as a university teaching assistant at Curie from

1993 to 1995 and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut Pasteur from 1995
to 1996. She moved to the US and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the
Rockefeller University in New York from 1996 to 1997. She worked as an
assistant research scientist at the New York University Medical Center from
1997 to 1999 and in 1999 held the position of Research Associate at the St.
Jude Children's Research Hospital and at the Skirball Institute of
Biomolecular Medicine in New York from 1999 to 2002.[2]
 After five years in the United States, she returned to Europe and
became lab head and a guest professor at the Institute of Microbiology and
Genetics, University of Vienna from 2002 to 2004. From 2004 to 2006 she
was lab head and an assistant professor at the Department of Microbiology
and Immunobiology. In 2006 she became private docent (Microbiology) and
received her habilitation at the Centre of Molecular Biology. From 2006 to
2009 she worked as lab head and Associate Professor at the Max F. Perutz
Laboratories.[2]

Charpentier moved to Sweden and became lab head and associate

professor at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden
(MIMS), at Umeå University. She held these positions from 2009 till 2014,
and was promoted to lab head as Visiting Professor in 2014. She moved to
Germany to act as department head and W3 Professor at the Helmholtz
Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig and the Hannover Medical
School from 2013 until 2015. In 2014 she became an Alexander von
Humboldt Professor.[2]

In 2015 Charpentier accepted an offer from the German Max Planck Society
to become a scientific member of the society and a director at the Max
Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin.[2] Since 2018, she is Founding
and Acting Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens.[3]
Charpentier retained her position as Visiting Professor at Umeå University
until the end of 2017, where a new donation from the Kempe Foundations
and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation has given her the
opportunity to offer more young researchers positions within research
groups of the MIMS Laboratory.[4]

Awards

Charpentier has been awarded numerous international prizes, awards

and acknowledgements, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences,
the Gruber Foundation International Prize in Genetics, the Leibniz Prize,
Germany's most prestigious research prize, the Japan Prize, and the Kavli
Prize in Nanoscience. She has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of
Knowledge Award jointly with Jennifer Doudna and Francisco M. Mojica,
whose pioneering work has ignited “the revolution in biology permitted by
CRISPR/Cas 9 techniques.” These tools facilitate genome modification with
an unprecedented degree of precision, and far more cheaply and
straightforwardly than any previous method. Not unlike today’s simple,
intuitive word processing programs, CRISPR/Cas 9 is able to “edit” the
genome by “cutting and pasting” DNA sequences: a technology so efficient
and powerful that it has spread like wildfire round the laboratories of the
world, explains the jury, “as a tool to understand gene function and treat
disease.” Also, in the Spring of 2015, Time Magazine designated Charpentier
one of the 100 most influential people in the world (together with Jennifer
Doudna).[8]

Memberships in science academies include the German National

Academy of Sciences Leopoldina,[9] the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences,[10] the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences[11] and The United States National Academy of Sciences.[12] In
addition, Charpentier has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from
the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), New York University (US), the
École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (Switzerland), Umeå University
(Sweden), Western University of London, Ontario (Canada) and Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology.