Dr. GPCR Podcast

Dr. Arthur Christopoulos

About Dr. Michel Bouvier

Michel Bouvier is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and the CEO of the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at the Université de Montréal.

Following his Ph.D. in Neurological Sciences at the same university in 1985, he completed a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University in the laboratory of Robert Lefkowitz. In 1989, he returned to Montréal as a professor of biochemistry and a scholar of the Medical Research Council of Canada at the Faculty of Medicine of the Université de Montréal.

Since 2001, he holds the Canada Research Chair in Signal Transduction and Molecular Pharmacology. Dr. Bouvier is the author of 300 scientific papers and 15 patents and delivered close to 500 invited conferences. He is a world-renowned expert in the field of cell signaling and GPCRs and made seminal contributions to our understanding of this major class of drug targets. In addition to paradigm shifts including inverse agonism, biased signaling, and pharmacological chaperones, his work on bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) resulted in the development of screening assays that are now widely used for drug discovery.

His work received more than 30,000 citations yielding an h-index of 95. He has supervised the research work of 75 graduate students and 40 post-doctoral fellows. Michel’s scientific contributions were recognized by the attribution of many awards and distinctions including his election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2014), the Julie Axelrod award from the American Society of Pharmacology and Exerimental Therapeutics (2017), the Wilder Penfield award from the Quebec Government (2017), the innovation award of ADRIQ (2019) and the 2021 Killam prize form the Canada Council for the Arts.

As some of you may know, Michel was one of my professors at the Universite de Montreal. He was also the head of both my Master’s and Ph.D. thesis committees. I was and am still impressed by Dr. Bouvier’s ability to ask highly relevant questions during meetings. In this episode, you will hear us talk about it.

I spent some time working in Michel’s lab with some of his postdocs and although I was never officially a member of the lab, I am humbled to have been able to work with him and his team and use the tools developed in his lab to better understand GPCR structure/function relationships.

Dr. Michel Bouvier on the web

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