Chris Bowler is
research director at the CNRS and director of the Plant and Algae Genomics
Laboratory at the Institut de biologie de l'École normale supérieure in Paris.
He received his PhD from the University of Ghent in Belgium, followed by
postdoctoral studies at the Rockefeller University in New York. In 1994 he
established his own laboratory working on signaling in plants and marine
diatoms at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy, and in 2003 he took up his
current position in Paris. He has been a member of EMBO since 1995, received
the CNRS Silver Medal in 2010, ERC Advanced Awards in 2012 and 2018 and the
Grand Prix Scientifique de la Fondation Louis D de l'Institut de France in
2015. In 2016-2017 he was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced
Studies at Harvard University, USA. In 2018 he was elected member of the French
Academy of Agriculture, and during the academic year 2020-2021 he held the
annual chair as Professor in biodiversity and ecosystems at the Collège de
France. His main research interest is the understanding of the response of
plants and marine diatoms to environmental signals, through functional and
comparative genomics. Since 2021 he is the scientific director of the Tara Oceans project to explore the
biodiversity, ecology and evolution of plankton in the world's ocean. In 2023 he was elected member of the Accademia dei
Lincei in Italy.