Patrick Charnay

Charnay has been a member of EMBO since 1995, of the Academia Europaea since 1998 and of the French Academy of Sciences since 2004. During his career, he has participated in (or chaired) numerous scientific committees.

Charnay is a former student of the École Polytechnique (1973 school year). Upon graduation, he turned towards fundamental biology and embarked on a science thesis in Pierre Tiollais' laboratory at the Institut Pasteur. He devoted himself particularly to the research of the cloning and sequencing of the hepatitis B virus genome, as well as to the synthesis of the surface antigen in the bacterium. His research findings paved the way for the development of a safe and effective vaccine against the disease. Charnay was recruited by Inserm in 1980. After obtaining his PhD in 1981, he did a postdoctoral fellowship in Tom Maniatis' laboratory at Harvard University (Cambridge, USA), where he studied the molecular basis for the regulation of globin gene expression. In 1984, he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg (Germany) as a group leader and focused on the study of transcription factors that played a decisive role in establishing the nervous system during development. Since 1989, he has been working in the Biology Department of the ENS, where he continues to study genes that play an important role in the development of the nervous system or its function and regulation. At ENS, Patrick Charnay was Director of an Inserm Unit (1993-2005), Director of the Biology Department (2000-2001 and 2016-2017) and Professor of Biology (2013-2018). He also taught at the École Polytechnique (1997-2010).

Patrick Charnay (born February 3, 1954) is a French biologist, researcher. Serving as an Emeritus research director for Inserm, he works and teaches in molecular genetics and development biology at the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris.