France

Hervé M. BlottièreResearch Director at INRAE, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hervé Blottière presently heads a research laboratory studying the Human Intestinal Ecosystem within the MICALIS institute “Food and Gut Microbiology for Human Health”. He is Scientific Director of the MetaGenoPolis initiative, a platform of excellence dedicated to quantitative and functional metagenomics, funded by the French government Futures Investments, where he has set up a robotic platform to allow high throughput screenings. He is also involved in ANR, the French National Research Agency, and the EU funded projects on Human Gut Microbiota and Health: MetaHIT, Cross-Talk and MetaCardis. Hervé Blottière obtained a PhD in Tumor Immunology from the University of Nantes (France) in 1989, and spent two years at the Wistar Institute (Philadelphia, U.S.A.). His main research interest is the Functional Metagenomics approach to study host-microbiota cross-talk. He has published >135 publications in peer reviewed scientific journals. His goal is to provide a better understanding of the symbiosis between gut microbiota and its host and to decipher the mechanisms of interaction between intestinal bacteria and human mucosal cells at the molecular level. Finding these molecular mediators will provide target for manipulation or therapeutics tools to restore symbiosis in chronic diseases.