Cytokinesis

Arnaud Echard received a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of Paris in 2000. In the lab of Dr. Bruno Goud at the Institut Curie, he discovered and characterized the first molecular motor of the kinesin superfamily localized at the Golgi apparatus. During his post-doctoral training at UCSF, USA in Pr. Pat O’Farrell Lab, he then worked on cell division in Drosophila embryos and carried out one of the first genome-wide RNAi-based screen designed to discovered conserved genes essential for cytokinesis.In 2003, he has been hired at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) first at the Institut Curie, then at the Institut Pasteur. There, he set up the lab “Membrane Traffic and Cell Division in the Cell Biology and Infection department in 2010.Since 2006, he is part-time Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Ecole Polytechnique, France. He has been awarded a Schlumberger Foundation Prize for Education and Research in 2010 and a Medical Research Foundation award in 2011. He has also been elected Vice-President (2012-2016) of the French Society for Cell Biology (SBCF) and President of the society since 2016, representing 180 labs and 1200 members.