Chris Bowler is Director of Research at the CNRS and Director of the Plant and Algal Genomics Laboratory at the Institut de biologie de l'École normale supérieure in Paris. He obtained his PhD from Ghent University in Belgium, followed by postdoctoral studies at Rockefeller University in New York. In 1994, he set up his own laboratory working on signaling in higher plants and marine diatoms at the Stazione Zoologicade Naples, Italy, and in 2002 took up his current position in Paris.

He has been a member of EMBO since 1995, received the CNRS Silver Medal in 2010, ERC Advanced Awards in 2012 and 2018 and the Fondation Louis D. de l'Institut de France Prize in 2015. In 2018, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Agriculture.

His main research interest is understanding the response of plants and marine diatoms to environmental signals, through functional and comparative genomics. He is one of the scientific coordinators of the Tara Océan project, which aims to explore the biodiversity, ecology and evolution of plankton in the world's oceans.