Olivier Pourquié

Biography

 Olivier Pourquié is currently Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Pathology at the Brigham and Woman’s Hospital.He also holds the position of DR INSERM. He served as Director of the Institute for genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg from 2009 to 2012, and prior to that was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City. For the past 15 years, Olivier Pourquié’s group has been studying the differentiation of muscle, skeletal and dermal precursor cells in the embryo and he is an internationally recognized leader in the field of musculo-skeletal axis formation and in muscle precursor cells differentiation. His laboratory’s discovery of the first evidence of the existence of a molecular oscillator- the segmentation clock- associated to the rhythmic production of vertebral precursors (the somites) in the embryo was recognized as one of the 25 milestones in Developmental Biology in the 20th century by Nature magazine. Pr. Pourquié is an elected member of the EMBO and of the Academia Europea. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Lounsbery Grand Prize of the French and American Academy of Sciences, the Allianz Grand Prize of the French Academy of Sciences and a European Research Council Advanced Grant.

Research Interest

  Cell therapy, small molecules