A committee chaired by Louis Schweitzer had the thorny mission of determining the best choice for the succession of Professor Didier Raoult, scheduled for the end of next summer: in a press release published today, he announces that he has proposed the appointment of Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier as Director of the IHU-Méditerranée Infection.
“This proposal is made, after the Committee has carried out a broad examination of the people, candidates or not, who may have the necessary qualities to lead the IHU, then after hearing the candidates it had selected”, specifies the communicated.
Yolande Obadia, president of the board of directors of the IHU, will present Louis Schweitzer’s proposal to the board of directors which will meet on July 13: “the appointment should take place at the end of this meeting”, indicates the IHU.
Asked by Liberation about not having been able to choose his successor himself, Professor Raoult had recently exclaimed: “If everyone hadn’t gone crazy, we would have taken the most competent in-house, at the IHU. The best is still someone who knows the house. »
Five candidates were in the running in the home stretch, according to Provence. In the end, it was an internal choice that prevailed (another professor from the IHU had also been selected for the hearings): head of an epidemiological and molecular surveillance team for infectious diseases, Professor Fournier, who also takes care of sequencing and the biobank of the IHU, had directed the PCR diagnostic laboratory for Sars-Cov2 during the epidemic. He had told in a video published on the IHU channel in June 2020 how this scientific and logistical effort had been put in place, with considerable inventiveness and deployment of resources. A feat he detailed in a new presentation with Elsa Prudent in August 2020:
Pierre-Edouard Fournier and Elsa Prudent explain to us the mysteries and workings of the IHU’s screening strategy, which has demonstrated responsiveness and great organizational capacity thanks to collaboration with the APHM, laboratories biology, veterinarians, etc. https://t.co/BNycfiADZd
— Monique Plaza (@MoniquePlaza3) August 25, 2020
Pierre-Edouard Fournier had passed his thesis under the supervision of Professor Raoult in 1999: it was devoted to the study of rickettsioses. “He presented a project that leads to a profound change in the IHU,” Louis Schweitzer told AFP.
When questioned, a professor from the IHU welcomes this choice, which he considers to be a change in continuity: with a real background as a recognized researcher, experience of the house, of project management and of people, a project at the height of the ambitions of the IHU, Pierre-Edouard Fournier has the right profile, he judges, noting in particular that his more “consensual” personality will be able to help recreate peaceful links with the AP-HM (Assistance publique- Hospitals of Marseille), supervisory body with which relations were notoriously strained.
Professor Fournier will have the difficult task of succeeding Didier Raoult, who founded this institute and will leave his post as director, but whose imprint will remain. On one of the frescoes painted along the IHU, we read: “We fear dégun (nobody, editor’s note)”. Pierre-Edouard Fournier will certainly change style and mode of operation, but will have to come to terms with the legacy of this flagship of care and research into infectious diseases.
See also: IHU press release [PDF]
This article was updated on June 29 at 3:38 p.m. (added IHU reaction).