Claude Desplan is Silver Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at New York University. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud. He obtained his doctorate in science from INSERM in Paris in 1983 and joined Pat O'Farrell at UCSF as a postdoctoral fellow. There, he demonstrated that the homeotic domain, a conserved signature of many developmental genes, is a DNA-binding motif. In 1987, he joined Rockefeller University as an Assistant/Associate Professor at the Howard Hughes Institute, where he continued his structural studies of the homeotic domain and its role in the evolution of embryonic axis formation. In 1999, Dr. Desplan joined New York University (NYU) as a Professor. He studies the generation of neuronal diversity using the Drosophila visual system, as well as aging and the role of pheromones in social animals such as ants. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and an elected member of EMBO, and has received numerous awards including the Conklin Medal from the American Society for Developmental Biology (SDB). His laboratory has produced a large number of researchers who direct their work in many parts of the world.
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Claude Desplan
Silver Professor, Department of Biology, New York University, USA