Professor QUINTANA-MURCI, presently Professor at the Collège de France and Institut Pasteur, is a world-renowned population geneticist. He earned his PhD in Population Genetics at the University of Pavia (Italy), after obtaining a MSc in Biology at the University of Barcelona (Spain). He was a visiting scientist at the universities of Oxford (UK), Tucson (USA), and more recently at the Rockefeller University in New York. Since 2007 he heads the Unit of Human Evolutionary Genetics at the Pasteur Institute, of which he was Scientific Director in 2016-2017. His research focuses on understanding the demographic and adaptive past of human populations, with a strong focus on Africa and the Pacific. He is also interested in how pathogens have exerted selective pressures on the human genome. In this context, his research focuses on the study of the genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors driving variation in human immune responses, as this helps to lay the foundations of precision medicine related to immune-related disorders and infectious diseases such as COVID-19. He has co-authored over 250 publications on fundamental population genetics as well as evolutionary genetics of infection and systems immunology. He is a member of EMBO, the Academia Europaea, and the French Academy of Sciences.