Dr. Maurice Boissinot is a microbiologist with work experience in both industry and academia. He obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology-immunology from Université Laval in 1989. He completed his post-doctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute (the largest private research institute in the early 1990s) in San Diego and at Chiron Corporation (one of the top three biotech companies at the time) in the San Francisco Bay Area. He returned to Université Laval as an Associate Professor and was a member of the Canadian Bacterial Diseases Network. From 1996 to 1998, he was the Scientific Director of BCM Oncologia, a small biotech company based in Quebec City. Since 1998, he has been project leader in Professor Michel G. Bergeron's molecular diagnostics group at Université Laval's Centre de recherche sur les maladies infectieuses (CRI), where he works on the development of rapid tests for the detection and identification of pathogenic microorganisms. He was a member of the team that developed the first two real-time PCR tests approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He was responsible for the development of rapid detection tests for Bacillus anthracis and SARS-CoV for military and civilian emergency response programs.
Prof. Michel G. Bergeron is currently an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval. He was a medical graduate from Laval University in 1968, then trained in internal medicine at McGill University and in microbiology/infectious diseases at Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. In 1974, he founded the Infectious Disease Research Centre (CRI) at Université Laval, of which he was the director until recently. He played a major role in the introduction of infectious disease research in Canada. He is also a Fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America (1989), and received, among others, the “Wilder-Penfield” Quebec Award in 2005. He was invested as an Officer of the National Order of Quebec in 2008, and in 2009, he was honored with the Medal of Service of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), and then invested as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2011. He received the Ernest C. Manning Innovation Principal Award (the highest Canadian distinction in innovation in all fields) in 2016, prior to being inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2017.
