Francis Quétier

Francis Quétier is Emeritus Professor at the University of Evry in France, where he has been teaching human & plant genomics and genetics since 2001. Francis is also project manager at Genopole, a bio-medical cluster located in Evry regrouping public and private research entities working on genomics, genetics and biotechnology.

Francis has worked on plant DNA his whole career. His research activity started on 1964 by studying plant DNA Biochemistry and Biophysics at Paris-Sud Orsay University where he headed a Plant Molecular Biology laboratory until 1995. In 1996, he participated to the launch of Génoscope, the French national sequencing platform, where he was Deputy Director until 2007. At Génoscope, he participated to the sequencing of the human chromosome 14. Francis has also been involved in several international consortia which sequenced the genomes of Arabidopsis, rice, medicago, grapevine, clementina, banana, cacao, coffee and, of course, wheat. He always had a personal interest in the wheat genome because his paternal branch of ancestors scores 12 bakers!

Francis also worked par-time at the french research funding agency ANR from 2005 to 2007 as programme officer in genomics and from 2008 to 2009 as department director.

Francis has been an early supporter of the chromosome based approach and played a key role in enabling French scientists to take the lead of the IWGSC effort early on with chromosome 3B – Catherine Feuillet