December 16, 2022
Bulletin interne de l'Institut Pasteur
ERC Starting Grants, Ile-de-France Region Innovators Award and Canetti Prize: several Institut Pasteur scientists recognized
• ERC Starting Grants: three scientists working at the Institut Pasteur among the successful candidates
On November 22, 2022, the European Research Council unveiled the list of recipients of ERC Starting Grants, a funding instrument aimed at early career scientists. The 408 laureates include three scientists working at the Institut Pasteur: Aleksandra Deczkowska, Head of the Brain-Immune Communication five-year group, Sarah-Hélène Merkling, a CNRS research associate in the Insect-Virus Interactions unit, and Jakob Ruess, an Inria research associate in the joint Inria/Institut Pasteur unit InBio: Experimental and Computational Methods for Modeling Cellular Processes.
• Jean-Baptiste Masson receives the 2022 Ile-de-France Region Innovators Award
In 2020, the Ile-de-France (Greater Paris) Region introduced an Innovators Award to encourage, support and develop research, technology transfer and the emergence of innovations in the field of medicine. It is awarded to three scientists each year.
This year, the winners assembled at the headquarters of the Regional Council in Saint-Ouen to receive their award from Valérie Pécresse, President of the Greater Paris Region, and Othman Nasrou, Vice-President of the Region with responsibility for Higher Education and Research.
The Greater Paris Region is home to a wealth of leading public and private scientific institutions that generate significant advances in the fields of medicine and health. To support scientists, the Ile-de-France Region Innovators Award aims to:
o Contribute to the recognition of a scientist and his/her team conducting research in the health sector,
o Strengthen the region's profile by boosting the collective strength of current teams and attracting new talent to the area,
o Encourage business development for lab-based research and the acquisition of cross-cutting skills needed by all team members,
o Promote an entrepreneurial spirit among young scientists.
For this 2022 edition, applications had to focus on scientific and technological fields in the health sector: drug development, medtech, biotech and digital technologies.
This year, Jean-Baptiste Masson, Head of the Decision and Bayesian Computation five-year group and founder of Avatar Medical, was one of the winners. He presented the DIVA platform, which offers instant volumetric representations of any 3D image on a screen in 2D, 3D and virtual reality, without the need for pre-processing. DIVA enables immersion and interaction with virtual avatars. The technology is based on advanced, probabilistic image representation algorithms and on a new approach to interactions and processing between users (surgeons and radiologists) and software.
• Olaya Rendueles-Garcia, winner of the 2022 Georges, Jacques and Elias Canetti Prize
Since it was introduced in 2006, the annual Georges, Jacques and Elias Canetti Prize has provided support for Institut Pasteur scientists carrying out research in the field of infectious diseases. The aim of the award is to recognize talent, encourage creation and reward the achievements of scientists.
The 2022 winner is Olaya Rendueles Garcia, a scientist in the Microbial Evolutionary Genomics Unit. As a microbiologist, she studies how the bacterial capsule develops and affects bacterial adaptation in the short and long term. She specifically focuses on the genetic exchanges responsible, in particular, for the transmission of antibiotic resistance.
The award was presented jointly by the Institut Pasteur President, Stewart Cole, and Françoise Canetti during a ceremony.
The event was also an opportunity to celebrate the 2021 laureate Etienne Simon-Lorrière, as no official award ceremony was able to be held last year. As a virologist, he studies how RNA viruses emerge and spread in populations and how they adapt to their environment. He particularly focuses his attention on the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the COVID-19 outbreak.
Read Stewart Cole’s Discourse (in French)
Photos: François Gardy/Institut Pasteur