Jean-Pierre Changeux Receives the Seal of the University of Urbino at the 3rd Networking and Training Event of ALLODD

Urbino, 18th June 2024 – Last week, within the framework of the 3rd Networking and Training event of the Innovative Training Network ALLODD - Allostery in Drug Discovery, the internationally acclaimed neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux was awarded the Seal of the University of Urbino Urbino, Italy). "Professor Changeux," said Rector Giorgio Calcagnini during the reading of the award's motivations, "is renowned worldwide for his exceptional scientific achievements and his leadership in the field of neuroscience. His thesis initiated over forty years of groundbreaking research aimed at unveiling the structure and function of neurotransmission. His work has provided deep insights into brain chemistry and the brain-mind relationship."
 
"It is a great honor to receive the Seal of the University of Urbino," Changeux remarked, "which for me symbolizes the bond between the research conducted in the Italian academia, the Collège de France, and the many Italian scientists who have worked in my laboratory. It is the first time," he joked before beginning his lecture titled The Allosteric Modulation of Receptors: Toward a New Pharmacology, "that I speak while wearing a gown, but this is an exceptional occasion."
 
After earning his doctorate in 1964 from the Pasteur Institute under the mentorship of Jacques Monod and François Jacob, and spending time at the University of California and Columbia University, Changeux returned to France to assist Professor Monod in the Chair of Molecular Biology. In 1972, he became the Director of the Molecular Neurobiology Unit at the Pasteur Institute. Until 2006, he held the Chair of Cellular Communications at the Collège de France, where he is currently an emeritus professor, as well as at the Pasteur Institute. He is also the honorary president of the neuroscience department at the Pasteur Institute and, since 2006, a member of the International Faculty at the Kavli Institute for Brain & Mind.
 
Author and co-author of numerous scientific papers, his contributions have garnered numerous international awards, including the Balzan Prize for Cognitive Sciences (2001), the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2004), the Biotechnology Study Center Award from New York University (2006), and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2018). Since 2010, he has been a foreign member of the Italian Academia dei Lincei. In the same year, he received the Grand Cross of the Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur, France's highest distinction.
 
The Seal of the University of Urbino, impressed in 1588, symbolizes the University's Renaissance traditions and has recently been bestowed upon distinguished figures from politics, science, literature, and civil service.
 
For more information:
 
Prof. Jean-Pierre Changeux
https://research.pasteur.fr/en/member/jean-pierre-changeux/
 
ALLODD
Coordinated by Dr. Zoe Cournia (BRFAA, Greece) and funded under the MSCA-ITN - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN) scheme, ALLOstery in Drug Discovery – ALLODD, is a collaboration between 13 academic and industrial organizations with the aim of training a new generation of scientists to exploit the concept of allostery in drug design, putting together a whole array of technologies to identify and characterize allosteric modulators of protein function that will be applied to therapeutically relevant systems.
https://www.allodd-itn.eu/
 
Related Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZuSdZj_IPI