Jean-Michel Claverie

Prof. Jean-Michel Claverie

Aix Marseille University
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Biography

My laboratory discovered and characterized the first giant virus, Mimivirus, in 2003. Since then, our laboratory has embarked on the permanent hunt for these new viruses in all kinds of environments, in their isolation, and in their genomic and functional characterization. This has resulted, for the moment, in the discovery of 4 new families of giant viruses: Mimiviridae, Pandoraviridae, Pithoviridae and Molliviridae. These discoveries revealed that an entire section of virology remained to be explored, and relaunched the old debate on the evolutionary origin and the very definition of viruses. Since 2014, we have also embarked on the characterization of viruses present in Siberian permafrost, after demonstrating that they could possibly remain infectious after more than 30,000 years spent in frozen soils. This raises new concerns about the potential resurgence of past infectious diseases of humans, animals or plants accompanying the thawing of permafrost in the context of global warming.

Affiliations

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Honors and Awards

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CNRS Silver Medal 2003

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - France

For ground breaking research in microbial genomics

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PRIX JAFFÉ

Institut de France, French National Academy of Sciences

For the discovery of giant viruses.

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Highly cited researcher 2018

Web of Science - Clarivate Analytics

Highly Cited Researchers are among those who have demonstrated significant and broad influence reflected in their publication of multiple papers, highly cited by their peers over the course of the last decade. These highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a chosen field or fields and year in Web of Science Of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, the Web of Science Group’s Highly Cited Researchers are one in 1,000.

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Highly cited researcher 2019

Web of Science - Clarivate Analytics

Highly Cited Researchers are among those who have demonstrated significant and broad influence reflected in their publication of multiple papers, highly cited by their peers over the course of the last decade. These highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a chosen field or fields and year in Web of Science.

honor

Knight in the National Order of the Academic Palms in 2016

French Ministry of Education and Research

Experience

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