Olivier Pourquié is Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Pathology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was the director of the Institute for Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) in France and before that a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City.The Pourquie laboratory is a world leader in vertebrate musculo-skeletal axis development. Using chicken and mouse embryos as model systems, they combine developmental biology and genomic approaches to study patterning and differentiation of the precursors of muscles and vertebrae. They also develop quantitative approaches at the interface with physics to study morphogenesis of the vertebral column. While most of this work is being carried out in vivo, they also develop protocols to recapitulate these early developmental processes in vitro using mouse and human embryonic or reprogrammed stem cells. Pourquié authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. He is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Academia Europaea, and the US National Academy of Sciences. His work on the segmentation clock that controls the periodicity of vertebrae was recognized as one of the milestones in developmental biology of the 20th century by Nature Magazine.