Claude Desplan, a biologist originally trained in France, has been a Silver Professor in New York University’s Department of Biology since 1999.
His research centers on understanding the development and functioning of the visual system that underlies color vision using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model organism.
As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Pat O’Farrell at the University of California, San Francisco, Desplan worked on the functional specificity of homeodomain proteins.
It has also sought to understand how color information that arises within the retina is processed in the optic lobe of the Drosophila brain by investigating the development and function of this structure.
He contributed broadly to the understanding of how insect embryos pattern their antero-posterior axis through extensive rewiring of a network of genes that are otherwise evolutionarily conserved in Drosophila.