François Blanquart

After training in theoretical evolutionary biology at the CNRS/Université de Montpellier (PhD 2013) and university of Aarhus (Denmark), François Blanquart moved to Imperial College London in a lab specialized in public health (2014-2017) to work on the evolution of infectious diseases. There, he worked on the evolution of HIV-1 virulence and obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship for a project on the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. In 2017 he joined the CNRS in Paris. He works on the evolutionary epidemiology of several pathogens including HIV-1, SARS-CoV-2, Escherichia coli. His approach is to analyze epidemiological and evolutionary data in the light of mathematical models to understand rapid pathogen adaptation. He collaborates with a number of evolutionary biologists and clinicians. One of his main projects at the moment is an ERC-funded collaboration with the Bichat hospital campus to better understand E. coli adaptation over the past decades. This involves creating a unique clinical cohort of healthy volunteers longitudinally followed-up over two years. This cohort will improve our understanding of E. coli ecology in commensalism and unravel factors associated with the ability to colonize the human gut, persist and transmit