Jules A. Hoffmann

Jules A. Hoffmann is a Luxembourg-born French biologist. He is chairman of the Management Board of the French National Scientific Research Center and was elected president of the French Academy of Sciences in 2007. In 2011, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine and the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine with Ralph Steinman and Bruce Beutler for their discoveries of how the innate immune system is activated.

Hoffmann received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg in France in 1969, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Marburg in Germany. From 1974 to 2009, he was the head of a research laboratory in Strasbourg in France and is currently the director of the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg. In addition, Hoffmann served as the president of the French Academy of Sciences from 2007 to 2008. In 1996, Hoffmann and his colleagues discovered a protein that could recognize pathogenic microorganisms, while studying the anti-infection mechanism of fruit flies, which greatly advanced research on the activation mechanism of the immune system.