Developmental Biology honoured this year by the French Academy of Sciences
This year, three members of the French developmental biology community were awarded prizes from the French Academy of Sciences for the excellence and scope of their work. Marie Manceau receives the Richard Lounsbery Award, Patrick Lemaire is awarded the Mottart Prize and Olivier Hamant is the winner of the Foulon Prize. The SFBD is pleased to see members of its community (including its president) rewarded for fundamental work carried out on species representative of the diversity of life.
The Richard Lounsbery Prize, awarded jointly by the French Académie des sciences and the American National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is, in 2020, honoring Marie Manceau from Collège de France, for the outstanding research she is carrying in the field of evolutionary developmental biology unraveling pattern formation and evolution in birds.
The Richard Lounsbery Award is a $75,000 prize given in alternate years to young (no older than 45) French and American scientists to recognize extraordinary scientific achievement in biology and medicine. It is administered in alternate years by the National Academy of Sciences and the French Académie des sciences. The Richard Lounsbery Award was established by Vera Lounsbery in honor of her husband, Richard Lounsbery, and is supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.
The MOTTART prize (5000€) is awarded to Patrick Lemaire, CNRS Research Director at the Montpellier Cell Biology Research Center (CNRS/University of Montpellier). With members of his team, he is studying the embryonic development of a small marine invertebrate, the ascidian Phallusia mammillata, chosen because of the simplicity and transparency of its embryos. His latest work has combined microscopy, image analysis and mathematical modeling approaches to describe, cell by cell, the embryogenesis of this animal and to analyze the role of communication between cells.
The Foulon Prize (3000€) is awarded to Olivier Hamant, Director of Research at INRAE, within the Plant Reproduction and Development Laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He is also an associate researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the University of Kumamoto (Japan). He is interested in the role of forces in plant growth and architecture. He combines for this purpose approaches of molecular biology, microscopy, micromechanics and computer modeling. At the same time, Olivier Hamant is strongly involved in environmental issues, through interdisciplinary training on the anthropocene, art-science projects and publications.
Find here all the prizes awarded this year by the Academy of Sciences.
