Jean-Michel Claverie, Wiki, Biography, Age
Jean-Michel Claverie is an Emeritus Full Professor of Genomics and Bioinformatics at the School of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University in the Structural and Genomic Information Laboratory, a unit of the French National Research Center (CNRS) that he founded in 1995.
Educations and Institutions
He got his initial training both in biochemistry, computer science and theoretical particle physics at the University of Paris and combined his multidisciplinary education into a Doctorate (Dr. Sc.) on the subject of mathematical modeling of the biological system in 1977.
Early Career
He then successively hold research positions at the Jacques Monod Institute (CNRS) in Paris, then at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, before creating in 1982 one of the first pre-Internet era computational biology laboratories at the Pasteur Institute (Paris) where he remained until 1990. He then returned to the USA, at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, NLM-NIH, Bethesda) where he participated to the exciting beginning of the genomic era, as a NIH senior Fogarty scientist, until 1995. Before returning to France, he spent one year as director of bioinformatics at Incyte pharmaceuticals (Palo Alto). Owing to his theoretical background, Jean-Michel Claverie worked on a wide range of topics ranging from the mathematical modeling of ultracentrifugation experiments, microbial and human genetics, cellular immunology, and more recently microbial genomics. Following the discovery and initial characterization of Mimivirus, the first "giant" virus in 2003, he then focused on the search for more giant and/or unconventional viruses in increasingly exotic environments. In the last ten years, his laboratory described four new families encompassing the largest known viruses in terms of particle and genome sizes: the Mega/Mimiviridae, the Pandoraviruses, Pithovirus and Mollivirus. The last two viruses were revived from 30,000 year-old Siberian permafrost, opening the field of "Paleovirology". While continuously searching for more ancient and/or exotic viruses, his laboratory is also involved in deciphering the biology and evolutionary origin of these giant viruses. Along these lines, he and his collaborators recently proposed that many of the viral genes without homologs in the cellular world could have been created de novo from intergenic regions. The laboratory’s approaches include structural, molecular, and cellular biology, high throughput proteomics, genome and transcriptome sequencing, environmental sampling, large-scale comparative genomics and metagenomics, together with the development of relevant bioinformatics methods for sequence analysis and data mining. Jean-Michel Claverie (H index=69, average citation>82) co-authored 261 scientific publications (WOS)(Pubmed: 248) that gathered >21,00 citations from more than 16,000 articles, as well as the best-seller book "Bioinformatics for Dummies". He served as a member of the Board of reviewing editors of the AAAS journal "Science" for 10 years (2002-2012). He was recipient of the CNRS Silver medal in 2003, and became a Knight in the National Order of the Academic Palms in 2016. He was listed among the Highly Cited Researchers in 2018 and 2019 (Clarivate Analytics, Cross-field category). 12 of the articles he co-authored are "highly cited" according to the Web of Science. Jointly with his wife, Dr. Chantal Abergel, he received the Prix Jaffé (French Academy of Sciences) in 2019 for their discovery and characterization of several families of giant viruses. In Sept 2019, he became an "Emeritus" professor, victim of the French mandatory retirement law. This will (officially ...) preclude him to lead a research team, apply for funding, or act as a PhD mentor in the university system. He will do his best to get around this regulation and continue his researches. •
