(Interview by James Briscoe. Originally published in Development)

Olivier Pourquié is the new director of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) in Strasbourg, France, and as of this month takes on another crucially important role in the developmental community — that of Development‘s new Editor in Chief. Recently, we asked James Briscoe, in his capacity as a director of the Company of Biologists, to interview Olivier and to discover more about his research career and interests and how they will shape the future content and directions of Development.

Describe your research interests in one sentence?
I am interested in embryonic patterning in vertebrates.

What projects are you working on at the moment?
We are trying to figure out how axis extension and segmentation are controlled in vertebrates. We are also carrying out large-scale studies to figure out the logic of the transcriptional programme that underlies paraxial mesoderm development.

What has been the most exciting moment in your career?
Realising that the static pictures of gene expression that we were seeing in the embryo in fact reflected the oscillatory gene expression that is associated with somite formation.

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A few weeks ago, Thomson Reuters selected the world’s hottest researchers. Their measurement of “hotness” is how often an author’s recent papers were cited by other researchers during 2009. At the top of the list is Rudolf Jaenisch of MIT, who authored 14 of those “hot papers”. The top institute on the list is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which has four researchers in the field of genetics and genomics represented in the top 12. Most “hot” scientists are based in the US, according to this list, but researchers from the UK, The Netherlands, China, and Japan also made the cut.

See the full list on Thompson Reuters’ website. What do you think of the ranking of researchers by citation scores as a measure of “hotness”?

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