France-Singapore Science and Innovation Lecture – Chris Bowler

1 July 2022

Department of Biological Sciences, NUS jointly organized the France-Singapore Science and Innovation Lecture Series 2022 with the Embassy of France in Singapore, in partnership with the Collège de France, PSL University, and the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF).

The Ambassador for France to Singapore, Ambassador H.E Marc Abensour, gave the opening address. 

The public lecture by Prof Chris Bowler on Tara Oceans: Eco-Systems Biology at Planetary Scale was attended by more than 140 academics, researchers and students from various research institutions. The talk was followed by a robust Q&A session.

Chris Bowler is Director of Research at the CNRS and Director of the Plant and Algae Genomics Laboratory at the Institute of Biology of the École normale supérieure in Paris. He obtained his PhD at the University of Ghent in Belgium, followed by postdoctoral studies at the Rockefeller University in New York. In 1994, he established his own laboratory working on signalling in higher plants and marine diatoms at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy, and in 2002 he took up his current position in Paris. He has been a member of EMBO since 1995, was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2010, ERC Advanced Awards in 2012 and 2018 and the Institut de France Louis D Foundation Award in 2015. In 2018 he was elected member of the French Academy of Agriculture. His main research interest is the understanding of the response of plants and marine diatoms to environmental signals, through functional and comparative genomics. He is one of the scientific coordinators of the Tara Oceans project to explore the biodiversity, ecology and evolution of plankton in the world’s oceans.