
Claude Desplan is a Silver Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at NYU. He was born in Algeria and was trained at Ecole Normale Supérieure St. Cloud, France. He received his DSc at INSERM in Paris in 1983 and joined Pat O’Farrell at UCSF as a postdoc. There, he demonstrated that the homeodomain, a conserved signature of many developmental genes, is a DNA binding motif. In 1987, he joined Rockefeller University as an HHMI Assistant/Associate Investigator to pursue structural studies of the homeodomain and the evolution of axis formation.
In 1999, Dr. Desplan joined NYU where he investigates the generation of neural diversity using the Drosophila visual system. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and an elected member of the EMBO.