Champaign, Illinois - February 2, 2013 - The winner of the Weber Award was announced during the Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prof. Maïté Coppey-Moisan has been chosen for the award.

Prof. Maïté Coppey-Moisan is Director of Research at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique et Médicale (INSERM) in Paris where she head a team and a cell imaging facility at Institut Jacques Monod. She coordinates a national distributed infrastructure, France-BioImaging, recently financed by the French government. Prof. Maïté CoppeyMoisan is also Associate Professor at University Paris-Diderot.

Prof. Coppey-Moisan was educated in physico-chemistry at University Paris 7 and obtained a PhD (“thèse 3ième cycle”) in 1976 in biochemistry and a “Thèse Etat” in 1981 in Biophysics working with Dave Jameson in Gregorio Weber’s Laboratory at Urbana Champaign. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the Tom Spiro’s Laboratory.

After 14 years spend on the functional properties of heamoproteins studied by steady state and time resolved spectroscopy (fluorescence and Raman), Prof. Coppey-Moisan’s research interest are in the field of macromolecular interactions and dynamics in living cells. She is one of the pioneers in the application of fluorescence spectroscopy for the analysis of DNA and chromatin dynamics in living cells. Her present research is focused on the mechanical tensions and the dynamics of cell shape regulation. Prof. CoppeyMoisan is also strongly involved in the dissemination of advanced light microscopy, super resolution and fluorescence fluctuations based spectroscopy to a wide scientific community in the frame of France-BioImaging.

Prof. Maïté Coppey-Moisan is the coauthor of over 50 articles or book chapters. She served French National Committees at INSERM, Agence National de la Recherche and University Paris-Diderot for several years. She is member of the National Scientific Committee of INSERM workshops.