Dr Alain Nicolas (CNRS Research Director) is a group leader in the Department of “Dynamics of genetic information: fundamental basis and Cancer” (Institut Curie). During his post-doc in the laboratory of J. Szostak, (Harvard Medical School), he identified the first initiation site of meiotic recombination in the yeast S. cerevisiae. His group pursued the molecular analysis of the mechanisms and the control of the initiation of meiotic recombination in yeast and extended his interest into the fields of replication, DNA repair, genome instability, genomics and human genetics.