Doctor honoris causa

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Life Sciences Institute, honorary doctorates were awarded April 18, 2018, to two renowned biologists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Malcolm Bennett, in the presence of a large audience.
Emmanuelle Charpentier is Professor and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin. She has made a career of carefully dissecting the systems by which bacteria control their genomes. It was through this work that she deciphered the molecule mechanism s of the bacterial CRISPR/Cas9 immune system and re-purposed as a tool to edit the genome of any organism. With this work she is providing unprecedented perspectives in the advance of basic research and the development of new medical treatments based on gene and cell therapy.
Malcom Bennett is Professor and Director of the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology, University of Nottingham. He is distinguished for his seminal work on plant root systems, the key organs that anchor plants to the substrate to ensure water and nutriment uptake. A strong proponent for interdisciplinary scientific approaches he developed the revolutionary "integrated plant phenomics" to analyse root growth and development. His research has a profound impact on the understanding of plant physiology and opens new avenues for the improvement of crop production.

Published on May 02, 2018