October 13, 2023
Bulletin interne de l'Institut Pasteur
Several Institut Pasteur scientists recognized
- Jean-Pierre Changeux receives the Erasmus Medal from the Academia Europaea
The Academia Europaea's Erasmus Medal is awarded to a European scholar who has maintained an outstanding level of international scholarship as recognized by peers over a sustained period. It is perhaps the highest recognition for purely scholarly achievements that the Academy can bestow on a scholar. The medal is awarded at the Annual Conference of the Academy, and on that occasion the recipient gives the annual Erasmus Lecture.
This year, the 2023 Erasmus Medal is awarded to Jean-Pierre Changeux, Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France, former holder of the Chair in Cellular Communications (1976-2006) and Honorary Professor at the Institut Pasteur.
Professor Changeux has received the medal at the Annual Conference of Academia Europaea, which held in Munich from October 9 to 11, 2023. At the conference he delivered the Academia Europaea – Heinz-Nixdorf Erasmus Lecture.
- Mathilde Ruggiu, winner of the L'Oréal-UNESCO "For Women in Science" French Young Talent Award
In France, women represent just 28% of university researchers in the field of basic science, and this has serious consequences for France's innovation capacity and the quality of its scientific progress. The L'Oreal Foundation is firmly committed to supporting the ambitions of young female scientists at a decisive point in their career so that more of them are able to access top scientific positions.
With its French Young Talent Award, launched in 2007, the Foundation supports early career female scientists in France so that they can acquire the skills and the confidence they need to overcome gender inequality, break the glass ceiling and contribute to scientific progress.
Every year, 35 Young Talents from a wide variety of backgrounds are recognized for their outstanding scientific research in mainland and overseas France. The aim of the awards is to encourage the next generation to pursue a career in science and to promote the recognition of female talent.
This year, Mathilde Ruggiu, a PhD student in the Dynamics of Immune Responses Unit led by Philippe Bousso, received this prestigious award for her research on a better understanding of the mode of action of cancer immunotherapy.
- AMR Data Challenge Awards – four Institut Pasteur scientists recognized
The Vivli AMR Surveillance Open Data Re-Use Data Challenge, funded by Wellcome, was launched in April 2023, as a catalyst for innovation and support for the inventive reutilization of the wealth of surveillance data available within the AMR Register.
Four Institut Pasteur scientists received the Impact Award in the first edition of the AMR Data Challenge. Lulla Opatowski, Eve Rahbé, Aleksandra Kovacevic and Quentin Leclerc, from the Epidemiology and Modeling of Bacterial Escape to Antimicrobials Unit, were recognized for their project "Stronger together? Potential and limitations of combining industry datasets to fill in global AMR surveillance gaps," which aims to address shortcomings in global antimicrobial resistance surveillance. Their research is based on an approach that standardizes and pools various industry databases with the aim of significantly increasing our ability to study the prevalence of resistance by combining different years, countries, bacterial species and antibiotics. In the long term, this approach will provide a larger volume of reliable data that will be useful for advanced analyses aimed at tackling the problem of antimicrobial resistance (predicting spatio-temporal trends, estimating AMR-related morbidity, using machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, etc.).
- AI 4 HEALTH Challenge
In November 2022, the Greater Paris region and its partners Medicen and Startup Inside launched the AI 4 Health Challenge. The aim was to use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the health of people living in Greater Paris.
The Institut Pasteur and Foch Hospital, co-organizers of the initiative, each set a challenge for participants involving the use of AI methods with health data. The two winning collaborative projects stood to receive €500,000 in funding.
On September 26, the winners of the AI 4 Health Challenge were announced during Medicen Day. The consortium composed of the company Scienta Lab and the Mathematics and Computer Science Laboratory for Complexity and Systems (MICS) at CentraleSupélec was selected to take up the Institut Pasteur's challenge. The aim of the research project led by this consortium, in collaboration with the Institut Pasteur, is to develop sophisticated, interpretable algorithms to predict the detailed blood cell composition, inflammation level and serological status of several vaccines and infections based on the DNA methylome.