Over the last seven years, François Taddei has created the CRI (Center for Research and Interdisciplinary) in Paris, which offers 3 programs integrated in the Liliane Bettencourt curriculum: a new undergraduate program, a Master’s degree (Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life Sciences, AIV), a doctoral school (Frontiers of Life, FdV). CRI‘s dedicated facilities host visiting professors, a wide choice of courses and several student discussion clubs. CRI’s main role is to promote new pedagogies to help creative students take initiatives and develop their research projects, with the help of mentors, research institutions, private companies, and foundations, such as the Bettencourt Foundation, which has supported many student-created activities. These activities range from the first French synthetic biology team (for the MIT-sponsored iGEM competition) to the "Paris-Montagne" science festival and the "Science Académie," an outreach program that allows high school students from disadvantaged neighborhoods to discover the creativity of science.
François Taddei also heads the Evolutionary Systems Biology team at a unit of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Paris-Descartes University’s Medical School. After a generalist scientific education, with majors in physics and biology at the École Polytechnique, he became a tenured higher civil servant at the French Ministry of Agriculture, before earning a Ph.D. in genetics, studying the evolution of the rate of evolution with Miroslav Radman. After postdoctoral training with John Maynard-Smith, for the last 12 years his research team has been studying innovation and degeneracy in biological systems. This work has produced many publications in generalist scientific journals, and has been recognized by several awards (European Young Investigator award, Human Frontier Science Program award, INSERM Award for Fundamental Research, Liliane Bettencourt Life Science Award).
François Taddei participates in various working groups on the future of research and education (“France 2025”, OECD report, etc.).