Prof. Francois Karch University of Geneva, Switzerland

François Karch obtained his diploma in natural sciences from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He then moved to the University of Geneva where he did his PhD in the laboratory of Alfred Tissières, determining the sequences of the heat-shock gene hsp70. For his postdoc, he joined the laboratory of... read moreWelcome Bender at Harvard medical school in Boston, where he began working on the homeotic genes of the bithorax complex. At that time Welcome Bender was communicating almost every day with Ed. Lewis, who can be considered as the founder of the homeotic gene field. François Karch is now a Professor in the Department of Genetics and Evolution at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Using the bithorax complex, his laboratory aims to elucidate how distant regulatory elements control their target promoters, to create precise temporal and spatial expression patterns during development. Their commitment of working in the native BX-C context is a trademark of the laboratory. The wealth of genetic information acquired for almost a century is unmatched in any other systems and reveals unexpected layers of complexity.