News
Francois Major honored by the Acfas
Published on October 8, 2010
On October 7, 2010 at the 66th annual Gala de l’Association francophone pour le savoir (Acfas), François Major received the prestigious Urgel-Archambault Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the field of bioinformatics. François Major is Principal Investigator at IRIC and Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the Université de Montréal.
Dr. Major was interested in bioinformatics well before the term was coined in the 1990’s. Upon the start of his graduate studies in computer sciences at the Université de Montréal in 1984, his ambition was to apply his knowledge to macromolecular structures. Following in the footsteps of one of his mentors, Robert Cedergren, he studied ribonucleic acids (RNA), which, along with proteins, play a primary role in cellular metabolism.
In 2005, IRIC recruited François Major to develop a bioinformatics core facility to study data generated by the Institute’s various technological tools. He also set up his own computational and theoretical biology research team at the Institute to study RNA structure and function.
In the spring of 2010, François Major and his team launched the very first ribonucleic acid (RNA) engineering laboratory in Canada. The team is seeking to control the behaviour of RNAs, which is at the core of the cell’s programming, in order to cure and even prevent cancer.
Created in 1953, in honour of Urgel Archambault, the founder and first director of École Polytechnique de Montréal, the prize is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding work in the advancement of physics, mathematics, engineering or computer science.