Chris Bowler

Chris Bowler is a CNRS research director and heads the Phytogenomics Laboratory at the Institut de Biologie de l'École Normale Supérieure in Paris. After undergraduate studies at the University of Warwick, he earned his PhD from the University of Ghent (1989) and completed postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University in New York. He founded his first lab in 1994 at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples and moved to Paris in 2003.

He has received major distinctions, including the CNRS Silver Medal (2010), ERC Advanced Grants (2012, 2018), and the Grand Prix Scientifique of the Fondation Louis D (2015). He was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard (2016–2017) and held the Chair in biodiversity at the Collège de France (2020–2021).

A member of EMBO since 1995, he has been elected to several academies, including the Accademia Dei Lincei (Italy), the Académie des Sciences (France) and the Royal Society (UK). He coordinates the Tara Oceans project, and focuses on marine diatom genomics and plankton biodiversity.