Frédéric Dardel

Professor, Advisor to the Chairman and the CEO, National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), France

Session

He participated in the "The new world of RNAs" session.

Biography

Frédéric Dardel is Professor of Molecular Biology at University Paris Descartes, and director of the “Institut Médicament, Toxicology, Chimie, Environnement”, a trans-disciplinary Instititute at the interface between chemistry, biology, and pharmacology. He is senior advisor to the Director  general and President of CNRS, the French basic research organisation. He has previously been deputy director and director of Life Sciences at CRS. He also heads the research group “RNA and anti-infectives” within the biological cristallography and NMR lab of the Faculty of Pharmacy in Paris (UMR 8015 CNRS/Université Paris Descartes).

After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique, he earned a PhD in molecular and cellular biology from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) and performed a post-doc in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University (UK). His scientific career covered many various fields, most often at the interface between biology, physics, chemistry and computing : molecular microbiology, enzymology, structural biology, bioinformatics and molecular pharmacology. His recent works are focussed on the study of the molecular mechanisms of essential bacterial and viral processes involving RNA molecules. His group has for instance analysed the very first step of HIV genome replication and solved several 3D structures of important RNA and proteins, which are targets for developping new anti-infective compounds.