Elisabeth Carniel is a researcher at the Institut Pasteur where she heads the Yersinia Research Unit (1). She is internationally renowned for her expertise on these enterobacteria, many of which are pathogenic to humans, including the agent responsible for plague.
She is a trained physician and a specialist in tropical medicine. She began her career as a researcher in Bangladesh. Back in France, she obtained her Ph.D. in Science and joined the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1988, where she led a laboratory combining fundamental research and public health activities on the Yersinia. After a two-year sabbatical at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Harvard Medical School in Boston, where she worked in the field of immunology, she returned to the Institut Pasteur in 1995. The laboratory she runs becomes a research unit in 2004.
During her career, Elisabeth Carniel has developed collaborations with many members of the Institut Pasteur International Network, including the Institut Pasteur in Iran, Madagascar, Saint-Petersbourg and Nha Trang, as well as FioCruz in Brazil and the Stephan Angeloff Institute of Microbiology in Bulgaria. Over the past three years, she has also been a Scientific Adviser to the Director of the Institut Pasteur in Côte d'Ivoire.
Elisabeth Carniel is author or co-author of nearly 200 original articles and reviews in international scientific journals. She will be assisted in her role as Director General of the Center Pasteur of Cameroon by Dr Suzanne Belinga, appointed Deputy Director General. Physician biologist specialized in drepranocytosis, Dr. Belinga has worked at the Pasteur Center in Cameroon since 1999.
(1) also WHO Collaborating Center and National Reference Center for Yersinia