Michèle Tixier-Boichard, Director of research at INRAE, becomes the new president of the World’s Poultry Science Association (WPSA), taking over from Professor Ning Yang (China)

Michèle Tixier-Boichard is a senior scientist at INRAE, where she has been working in animal genetics since 1985, mainly on chickens, after her PhD on pig breeding, also performed at INRAE. Her current research topics involve feather colour genes, molecular assessment of genetic diversity in chickens, characterisation and conservation of local breeds. She published 140 papers in peer-reviewed journals and supervised 12 PhDs. Since February 2010 she is chairing the board of the French National Gene bank. Since 2016, she is the coordinator of the French National Infrastructure of biological resource centres for agriculture research (AgroBRC ; https://www.agrobrc-rare.org/) and coordinates its branch for domestic animals, CRB-Anim, created in 2012 (https://crb-anim.fr).

The World’s Poultry Science Association was created in 1912 and currently gathers almost 8000 members worldwide, from research, industry and education. Michèle Tixier-Boichard is one of its member since 1989 and chaired the Working group «Breeding and Genetics» of the European Federation between 1994 and 2002. With the French branch, she organised the European Symposium of Poultry Genetics in France in 2017. She was elected Vice-President of the European Federation in 1998 as well as an elected Vice-President of the WPSA board from 2004 to 2016. She currently is deputy chair of the French branch and is chairing the organizing committee of the 26th World’s Poultry Congress, held in Paris from August 7 to 11, 2022. She supervised the production of the 6 minutes video celebrating the centenary of WPC in 2021.

Contact

• Michèle Tixier-Boichard (e-mail)