Didier Trono, M.D.

Member of the Executive Committee

Born in 1956, Didier Trono obtained his M.D. from the University of Geneva in 1981. After completing a clinical training in pathology, internal medicine and infectious diseases in Geneva and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, he joined in 1986 David Baltimore’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT as a post-doctoral fellow. In 1990, he moved to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies of Jolla as an assistant professor, where he launched a center for AIDS research.

Promoted to associate professorship in 1995, he returned two years later to Switzerland as a full professor within the Department of Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Geneva. He took the head of this department in 2000 and, a year later, the presidency of the Basic Sciences Section of the Faculty of Medicine. In October 2004 he became professor and dean at the School of Life Sciences of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and for the last four years has been serving as deputy director of the Swiss National Science Foundation “Frontiers in Genetics” Center of Excellence.

Didier Trono’s research focuses on interactions between viral pathogens and their hosts, and on the exploration of genetics from both fundamental and therapeutic perspectives.