Francoise Barre-Sinoussi

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi is a French virologist who did fundamental work identifying the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, as the cause of AIDS, isolating and growing the virus from a patient lymph node biopsy during the early years of the epidemic in the early 1980s, work that enabled the development of diagnostic tests and later treatments. She shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Luc Montagnier, her former mentor, for the discovery of HIV, and with Harald zur Hausen, recognized separately for his work on human papillomaviruses and cervical cancer. Barre-Sinoussi joined the Institut Pasteur in the early 1970s, received her PhD in 1974, interned at the United States National Institutes of Health, then returned to the Institut Pasteur under Montagnier supervision before starting her own laboratory there in 1988 and becoming head of the Biology of Retroviruses Unit in 1992. She served as president of the International AIDS Society from 2012 to 2016 before her mandatory retirement from active research in 2015.