Dr. Prochiantz was born in Paris were he received his education at the Faculty of Sciences and the Ecole Normale Superieure. His doctoral and post-doctoral training was in Molecular Biology and Developmental Neuroscience, with long stays at the Faculty of Sciences (Paris) and Collège de France (Paris) and shorter stays (between six months and one year) at MIT (Cambridge, USA) and New York University Medical School. His interests lie in the development and physiology of the nervous system, with a special focus on homeogenes and homeoprotein transcription factors. His group is at the origin the discovery of an unsuspected signaling property of these transcription factors (their intercellular transfer) and has opened the domain of transduction peptides, a family of small peptides capable of crossing the plasma membrane and used as vectors to address hydrophilic compounds into the cell cytoplasm and nucleus. Dr. Prochiantz is presently head of the CNRS Research Unit Development and Evolution of the Nervous System at Ecole Normale Supérieure and member of the French Academy of Sciences.