Speaker Details

Mohamed-Ali Hakimi

Mohamed-Ali HAKIMI was born in Guelma and immigrated to France with his parents in 1978. He serves as a Research Director at INSERM, leading a parasitology team at the Institute for Advanced Biosciences (IAB) in Grenoble. A graduate of the Université Joseph-Fourier in 2000, he played a key role in discovering RNA polymerases IV and V, which are unique to plants. Following his doctorate, he pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, USA where he contributed to identifying the Integrator complex, crucial for processing nascent RNA in metazoans. Upon returning to France in 2003, he joined INSERM and founded his own research group with an ATIP/AVENIR grant from CNRS. Promoted to DR2 in 2008 and DR1 in 2019, his team has made significant advancements in parasitology, including discovering Toxoplasma effectors that disrupt the host's immune response, identifying potential treatments for toxoplasmosis and malaria, and achieving in vitro culture of Toxoplasma sexual forms without using cats. Mohamed-Ali has received numerous prestigious awards, such as the CNRS Claude-Paoletti Prize in 2003, the Sanofi Pasteur Junior Prize in 2015, and the FRM Jacques Piraud Prize in 2023. He was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2013 and earned the FRM team label in 2022. Since 2019, he has served as the deputy director and scientific coordinator of the National ParaFrap LabEx, a member of INSERM's CSS5 commission since 2016, and was appointed to the Scientific Council of FRM in 2023. He was elected a member of EMBO by his peers in 2023 and became one of the 22 laureates of the Chaires d’Excellence en Biologie/Santé (France 2030) in 2024.