| Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo | |
| Birth Name: | Virginie Courtier |
| Birth Place: | Meaux, France |
| Nationality: | French |
| Alma Mater: | Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) Pierre and Marie Curie University Princeton University |
| Occupation: | Biologist. CNRS research director |
Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo is a French researcher of evolutionary biology and genetics. She is a director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and head of the Drosophila Evolution Team at the Institut Jacques Monod.[1]
Born in Meaux, Courtier-Orgogozo took preparatory classes in Life and Earth Sciences so she could pursue a career in biology, and she graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). She earned her Ph.D. at Pierre and Marie Curie University with the thesis titled, Formation of sensory organs in D. Melanogaster: cell lineages, apoptosis and evolution supervised by François Schweisguth.[2] She continued her post-doctoral work at Princeton before returning to France and joining the CNRS.[3] [4]
Her interests have centered on the molecular and cellular mechanisms that lead to the formation of a complex multicellular being from a single egg.[5]
In April 2010, Courtier-Orgogozo began supervising an ATIP-AVENIR four-person team at the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris. In time, her team grew to ten people working in the Courtier-Orgogozo Laboratory who are studying several concrete cases of evolution in insects to identify general rules that govern the evolution of living beings.
The Irène Joliot-Curie Prize that she received in 2014 cited her research on mutations responsible for changes that occurred during the evolution of several species of Drosophila flies, to trace their evolutionary history and to better understand the fundamental mechanisms and the general understanding of their evolution, past and future.