Jean-Michel Claverie

Jean-Michel Claverie is an emeritus professor at the School of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University, in the South of France. After completing his PhD (Dr. Sc) at the University of Paris in 1977, he started a nomadic career holding research positions at the CNRS in Paris, The Salk Institute (La Jolla), The Pasteur Institute (Paris), the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH, Bethesda), and Incyte, a global biopharmaceutical company (Palo Alto). Dr. Claverie returned to France in 1995, where he created a new laboratory with his wife and co-worker Dr. Chantal Abergel. This laboratory is most known for their studies of “giant” viruses, the discovery of which in 2003 deeply challenged several basic concepts in virology and marine microbiology. In 2014, they went on to create the new field of "paleovirology" with their discovery of the first infectious viruses in ancient Siberian permafrost.