Dr Olivier Neyrolles is a CNRS Research Director at the Institute of Pharmacology & Structural Biology in Toulouse, France, where he heads the TB & Infection Biology (TBIB) Department together with Dr Christophe Guilhot, and the Mycobacterial Interactions with Host Cells group since 2008. Dr. Neyrolles’ group works on various aspects of host-pathogen interactions in TB, including mycobacterial pathogenicity and virulence, host cell defence mechanisms, with the aim of discovering and developing new strategies for vaccination and treatment.
Dr Neyrolles came to the IPBS from Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he was permanent researcher in the team of Prof. Brigitte Gicquel, pioneer of the genetic studies in TB. Before joining Prof. Gicquel’s laboratory, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Imperial College, London, in the laboratory of Prof. Douglas Young. In 2009 he received the CNRS Bronze medal, which ‘recognizes a researcher’s first work, which makes that person a specialist with talent in a particular field. This medal is a way for the CNRS to encourage the researcher to continue work that has met with initial success and already produced fruitful results.’ In 2014 he received the ‘Coup d’Elan’ Prize from the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation, which recognizes both the quality of the work of Olivier Neyrolles’ team and the quality of the research conducted in the TBIB Department at IPBS in the field of TB vaccine and antibiotics development.
