Sigolène Meilhac is a research director at Inserm and has led the “Heart Morphogenesis” team at the Pasteur Institute and the Imagine Institute (Paris) since 2015. She studies how the heart develops in the embryo and how this process goes awry in congenital heart defects observed at birth. A graduate of the École normale supérieure, she turned to developmental biology during her doctoral research, which she completed in 2003 at the Institut Pasteur under the supervision of Dr. Buckingham. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge (United Kingdom), she was recruited by Inserm in 2006. Her interdisciplinary team brings together biologists, physicians, and computational scientists. She has developed new methods for quantifying and modeling the structure of the heart, as well as for detecting molecular asymmetries in the embryo. She has thus elucidated the mechanisms underlying the right-left asymmetry of the heart, which is essential for the establishment of dual blood circulation. She has redefined the concepts governing the emergence of right-left laterality in the embryo. This research reveals the developmental origins of diseases such as heterotaxy and situs inversus , and has led to the identification of new genes involved in rare cardiac malformations. Sigolène Meilhac is the recipient of the 2018 Pasteur Vallery-Radot Prize and the 2024 iXcore Exail iXlife Foundation Prize for Research.
Sigolène Meilhac is the recipient of the 2026 Antoine Lacassagne Award , as nominated by Prof. Jean-Jacques Hublin, Chair of Paleoanthropology .