CIRMF - General Management

The Director General of the CIRMF is a scientist named for five (5) years by the Board of Directors, after consultation with the Bureau of the Scientific Council. His term is renewable. The Director General oversees, upon delegation of the Board, the operations of the CIRMF; he represents the CIRMF in civil and legal actions; he recruits, appoints and manages the entire staff of the CIRMF. In the specific case of researchers, he consults with the Scientific Council; attends and has a consulting vote in meetings of the Board of Directors and the Scientific Council. The current Director General of the CIRMF is Dr. Jean Paul Gonzalez. He is also Scientific Director and heads the new “Health Ecology” research unit on cross-cutting health themes.

Biography of the Director General of the CIRMF :

Jean-Paul Gonzalez was born in Aquitaine in south-western France. He obtained his doctorate in medicine at the School of Bordeaux (University of Bordeaux II) in 1974. After his residency at Andre Bouron Hospital in Saint Laurent du Maroni (French Guiana), he spent his entire career outside France, first as a young doctor and then as a researcher. He obtained his PhD in viral ecology in 1984, from the University of Clermont-Ferrand in central France (Auvergne region). After his national service at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis (Tunisia), he was recruited in 1976 by the Institute for Development Research (IRD, formerly ORSTOM in Paris) where he devoted himself to medical research, training and development in several countries of the Americas, Africa and Asia. His main research disciplines range from epidemiology of viral diseases to molecular virology to viral ecology. His research objectives are aimed at vector-borne viral diseases, viral hemorrhagic fevers and emerging viral diseases. In the late 70s, he headed international research teams in developing countries, for his Institute and with its institutional partners. For over ten years, he led the virology teams at the Pasteur Institute in Dakar (Senegal) and Bangui (Central African Republic). He spent several years in the United States of America where he worked as a visiting scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta (Georgia), then as a Visiting Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at the School of Medicine at Yale University in New England (Connecticut, USA). He developed his expertise in high security laboratories and participated in the early development of geographic information systems applied to health research. In 1997, he worked as a visiting professor of microbiology at Mahidol University (Bangkok, Thailand), where he created the first research centre on emerging viral diseases in Asia. Then, at the Mahidol Faculty of Science, he developed a technical research platform dedicated to a multidisciplinary approach to vector-borne diseases. With his teams, he identified new pathogens for humans and animals and new tropical diseases. He developed a new medical scientific school of thought, including the principle of co-evolution of ancient microbes and their hosts over geological time, and secondly, the study of disease emergence in terms of conditions and territories using an interdisciplinary approach involving social, biomedical and environmental science. He has written dozens of books and book chapters and over 170 scientific articles in leading journals. On September 1, 2008, the Gabonese government appointed him Director General of the International Centre for Medical Research in Franceville, where he was appointed under the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.