2023 Vallee Scholar Awards: recognition for an Institut Pasteur scientist

Recognizing that outstanding, young, independent investigators are the source for future advances in the biomedical sciences and of their need for flexible, unrestricted funding to conduct their research, the Vallee Scholars program makes grants of $340,000 – to be spent over a period of four years – to junior faculty carrying out basic biomedical research.  This award is available only to investigators who have been nominated by institutions that have been selected by the Vallee Foundation Board of Directors. One nomination will be accepted per institution.  The candidate must have received his/her PhD, MD, or other professional degree, within twelve years of the application deadline and, by the same date, have been in an independent research position (tenure track or equivalent) for six years or fewer.

One of the six laureates selected this year was Thibaut Brunet, Head of the Evolutionary Cell Biology and Evolution of Morphogenesis five-year group (G5).

Research in the Brunet lab addresses a simple but unsolved question: how did the first animals acquire and control their shape? When and how did early assemblies of cells become more than the sum of their parts, by generating collective behaviors that allowed organism-scale morphogenesis and motility? While the very first multicellular ancestors of animals were likely microscopic (and too small to leave fossils), one can gain insights into these questions via the comparative study of living groups. The Brunet lab investigates the cell biology, morphogenesis and behavior of choanoflagellates, the closest known living relatives of animals. Choanoflagellates can switch between unicellular and multicellular lifestyles, display temporal cell differentiation, and have recently become amenable to functional molecular genetics. The Brunet lab wants to understand how the cell shape of choanoflagellates is controlled, how it dynamically responds to the environment, and how choanoflagellates sometimes develop into multicellular colonies capable of emergent collective behavior. One of its main strategies is the discovery of establishment of new model systems capable to shed fresh light on fundamental and enduring biological questions. One of them, the recently discovered choanoflagellate species Choanoeca flexa, displays contractile collective behavior hitherto unknown in unicellular relatives of animals, but reminiscent of animal motricity and thus susceptible to inform the first steps in the evolution of animal behavior.

Find out more