François Guillemot investigates the mechanisms that regulate the behaviour of neural stem cells. He has identified transcription factors that induce neuronal programmes in neural stem cells in the embryo and the adult brain, and he has defined the molecular pathways through which these factors act.

François is a senior group leader at the Francis Crick Institute. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and obtained a PhD at the Institut d’Embryologie du CNRS. He undertook postdoctoral trainings at Harvard Medical School and at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. In 1994, he set up his lab at the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire in Strasbourg and moved to the National Institute for Medical Research in London in 2002. François was elected to EMBO in 2000 and to The Academy of Medical Sciences in 2009. He was awarded the Ribeiro Caro Almela Prize for Research in Developmental Neurobiology in 2007 and has been President of the International Society for Developmental Neurobiology since 2009.