Denis Duboule

Biosketch

Denis Duboule (1955), Swiss and French national, studied biology at the university of Geneva where he obtained a PhD in mammalian embryology in 1984. After being a postdoc and a group leader in the medical faculty in Strasbourg (France) and a PI at the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology (EMBL, Germany), he was appointed full professor at the university of Geneva in 1993 where he chaired the department of Genetics and Evolution from 1997 to 2017. From 2001 to 2013, he chaired the Swiss national center of research “Frontiers in Genetics”. In 2006, he was appointed as a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne and was elected Professor at the Collège de France in Paris in 2017. He is a member of the Academia Europea as well as of several academies in Switzerland, France and the Netherland. He is a foreign member of the Royal Society (UK) and of the National Academy of Sciences USA. He has received various scientific prizes and awards, amongst which the Marcel Benoist Prize, the Louis-Jeantet prize for medicine in 1998 or the international INSERM prize in 2010.

Research Interests

Duboule's research activities are in the fields of embryology, genetics and developmental genomics of mammals, in an evolutionnary context. In particular, his laboratory has been closely associated with the structural and functional studies of mammalian Hox genes, by using mouse molecular genetic approaches. For the past many years, the main aim of the laboratory is to understand how the transcription of Hox genes is coordinately regulated, during development, such as to promote a coherent organization of structures, and how such regulatory capacities have evolved along with the emergence of the vertebrate lineage.