Message from the President: 200 days

" Dear Colleagues,

I trust that you have all had an excellent vacation and been able to relax and enjoy this splendid summer, which, occasionally, was too warm for some of us.  The hot weather was also an operational challenge for a research institute like ours with a campus that reflects nearly 130 years of architecture with styles ranging from the most modern, the "Omics" building to be inaugurated on September 13th, to the original one, where Louis Pasteur himself worked.  

Our Senior Management (CODIR) team took advantage of the summer break to analyze the achievements made during the period 2014 – 2018 and to finesse the next Strategic Plan (2019 – 2023). The new Strategic Plan is now nearing completion and I would like to thank all of you who have contributed and shared your ideas and all the directors in charge of different aspects of the plan. The next steps in the procedure are a presentation of the outline to the Conseil d'administration (CA – the board of administrators) during a special seminar to be held on September 26th followed by a high-level exchange during the board meeting on October 19th.

The 2019 – 2023 Strategic Plan will present an exciting and focused strategy for the coming years that covers not just research, public health, innovation and teaching, but also addresses the means to be used to reach our goals and, especially, how we will finance them.  

An important component of the Strategic Plan will be the renovation of the 25 rue du Docteur Roux side of the campus: our ambition is to build a state-of-the-art facility in large part dedicated to research on infectiology and vector-borne diseases. I want to mention here, that for this reason, we will not establish a second campus in Saclay.

After October 19th, you will all be invited to a meeting where the strategic plan and the financial perspectives will be presented.  

One of our duties at the Institut Pasteur is to share our expertise with others and to train scientists from France, and other countries around the world, especially our partners from the International Network of Pasteur Institutes (INPI), so that when they return home or take up new posts elsewhere they help to propagate the Pasteur mission.  This also applies to our colleagues working in other sectors and I would like to inform you that our financial director, Corinne Fortin, will be leaving us soon to join the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) as Deputy Director. We wish Corinne well in this venture and look forward to creating closer ties with the ICM.  

Preparation of the Strategic Plan also allowed us to reexamine our financial model including our interactions with the biotechnology sector and our industrial partners.  Particular attention was paid to enhancing the management of our endowment and this is one of several new opportunities that will be debated with our board in the upcoming meetings and, of course, with our social partners. Here, the President of the board, Christian Vigouroux and I will shortly be hosting the newly elected members of the Assembly des 100 for a working lunch and introduction to the Institut Pasteur.

Having shared this information, I would like to welcome you back from your holidays and wish you every success in the coming semester."

Stewart Cole