Michel Bouvier

Michel Bouvier is a professor of Biochemistry at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at the Université de Montréal. He is also the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer – Commercialization of Research – IRICoR. Following his Ph.D. in Neurological Sciences at the same university in 1985, he completed a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University. 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. He was Chairman of the Biochemistry Department between 1997 and 2005 and was awarded the Hans-Selye/Bristol-Myers Squibb chair in Cell and Molecular Biology that he held between 1997 and 2005. He now holds the Canada Research Chair in Signal Transduction and Molecular Pharmacology.

Dr. Bouvier is the author of over 245 scientific papers and delivered to more than 390 invited conferences. He supervised the studies of 42 graduate students and 33 post-doctoral fellows. He is a world-renowned expert in the field of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and made seminal contributions to the understanding of this major class of drug targets that led to applications for human health. His work led to paradigm shifts that had a significant impact on drug discovery including the discovery of inverse agonism at GPCRs and pharmacological chaperones to restore the folding of disease-causing genetically mutated GPCRs.