Norbert Perrimon

Norbert Perrimon is a French geneticist and developmental biologist. He is the James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an Associate of the Broad Institute. He is known for developing a number of techniques for used in genetic research with Drosophila melanogaster, as well as specific substantive contributions to signal transduction, developmental biology and physiology.

Perrimon was born in 1958 in Bosguérard-de-Marcouville, France. He earned his undergraduate degree (Maitrise of Biochemistry) at the University of Paris VI, in 1981, then completed his doctorate in 1983 with Madeleine Gans, also at the University of Paris.

From 1983 to 1986 Perrimon was a postdoctoral researcher with Anthony Mahowald^[3][4][5][6] at Case Western Reserve University, and in 1986 at the age of 27 he accepted an appointment as faculty at Harvard Medical School. He is currently the James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1986.^[7]

Perrimon's group developed many methods that have significantly improved the Drosophila toolbox. Perrimon co-developed the GAL4/UAS system method with Andrea Brand to control gene expression in Drosophila.^[8] This method has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife”^[9] and is widely used in Drosophila genetics. Together with Tze-bin Chou, he developed the FLP-FRT DFS method to generate germline mosaics, a method that allowed the large-scale characterization of the maternal effect of zygotic lethal mutations.^[10][11][12] He developed and improved methods in vivo RNAi with Janquan Ni.^[13][14][15] His lab has pioneered high-throughput whole-genome RNAi screening to interrogate systematically the function of all fly genes in various cell-based assays.^{[16][17][18][19][20][21][22]} With Ram Viswanatha, he developed CRISPR/Cas9 pooled screens in Drosophila cells to facilitate large-scale screen in Drosophila and other arthropod cell lines.^[23] The approach is particularly powerful to identify the mechanism of entry of toxins.^[24]

In 2003 he created the Drosophila RNAi Screening Center at Harvard Medical School and in 2008, he initiated the Transgenic RNAi Project to generate transgenic RNAi lines for the community using optimized shRNA vectors that his lab developed.

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Perrimon was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in April 2013,^[18][25] after naturalizing as an American citizen.

• Lucille P. Markey Scholar in Biomedical Sciences, 1985.^[26]
• Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 1986–present
• Chaire d’Etat. College de France. Paris, 2003
• George W. Beadle Medal, Genetics Society of America, 2004^[1]
• RNAi Innovator Award, 2009^[27]
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008^[28]
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2009
• Associate member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) 2011
• Fellow of the United States National Academy of Sciences, 2013