Rabies Hero Awards 2022, winners of the 2022 Pasteur Vallery-Radot Prize

Rabies heroe awards 2022

 

Hervé Bourhy, Head of the National Reference Center (CNR) for Rabies, received a Rabies Hero Award for his achievements in driving education, raising the profile of the disease, and building networks of rabies champions around the world. The rabies training that he has established in Africa is a milestone in improving the understanding and control of the disease in the region, engaging and empowering the community to take the necessary steps to eliminate rabies. His role with the World Health Organization (WHO) is key in keeping rabies on the agenda. We are pleased to recognize his wide input into rabies control in the many areas he contributed in.
 

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Winners of the 2022 Pasteur Vallery-Radot Prize

 

Jacqueline Pasteur Vallery-Radot, the wife of Louis Pasteur's grandson, chose the National Library of France (BnF) as the residuary legatee of her estate. Under the terms of her will, the BnF awards two €16,000 prizes every year in consultation with the Institut Pasteur.
Since 2007, these prizes have been awarded annually to two French scientists under the age of 50 and working at the Institut Pasteur who have led a major scientific project in the field of biology or physics/chemistry over the last five years, thus proving themselves to be worthy heirs of Pasteur himself.

Winners are chosen by a panel of Institut Pasteur and French Academy of Sciences members, chaired by the Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.

This year, the two Pasteur Vallery-Radot Prizes went to:

Germano Cecere, Head of the Mechanisms of Epigenetic Inheritance G5, whose research and that of his team focuses on the type of information transmitted and the mechanisms used by small RNAs to pass on information, acquired throughout the life of an individual, over several generations. The aim of their research is to explain how the experiences of our ancestors can have an influence on our own lives. This epigenetics research sheds new light on theories related to the heredity and inheritability of diseases.

 

Francesca Di Nunzio, Head of the Advanced Molecular Virology five-year unit, whose work and that of her team explores the way in which viruses (especially HIV) manipulate cellular mechanisms to establish coexistence with the host. They recently traced the genome of the virus in living cells in the nuclear environment, a compartment where they also observed completion of viral reverse transcription, a process which had previously been thought to occur entirely in the cytoplasm of the host cell.

To find out more about the research of the 2022 winners, see the press release (in French)