Christine Petit
Christine
Petit
Christine Petit (Photo credit: Peter Bagde).
Christine Petit studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine Pierre and Marie Curie and basic biological sciences, genetics and biochemistry at Orsay University. She gained her Ph.D. at Institut Pasteur.
In 2002 she was appointed Professor in Genetics and Cellular Physiology at Collège de France. She is head of the "Génétique et physiologie de l'audition" lab at the Institut Pasteur, Inserm and Sorbonne Université.
Her early work included research on human sex chromosome inversion, smell and vision. In 1994 she began publishing work on hereditary deafness, leading to new experimental models with which she has revealed the roles of various genes in sound processing. In 2018, she oversaw the opening of the new Hearing Institute, Paris, for interdisciplinary neuroscience research around hearing.
Honours include the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine (2001), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2006), and foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA, 2016). Christine Petit is a member of the French Académie des Sciences.
Christine Petit life story
Christine Petit and the Norwegian Minister of Higher education and research Iselin Nybø during the Kavli Prize week in Oslo (Photo credit: Thomas Eckhoff).
Colour-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of the inside of a guinea pig inner ear showing the hearing organ, or cochlea. Running along the spiral structure are rows of sensory cells which respond to different frequencies of sound. The whole organ is just a few millimeters long. (Photo credit: Dr. David Furness/Wellcome collection)
Watch videos with Christine Petit:
2018 Kavli Prize Winners - NEUROSCIENCE: James Hudspeth, Robert Fettiplace and Christine Petit
Christine Petit Explores the Genetics of Hearing