[2] Initially trained as a physician in Paris, Fassin practiced internal medicine as an infectious disease specialist at the Hospital Pitié-Salpétrière and taught public health at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (present day Sorbonne University).

from the University of Paris, and his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing his thesis on power relations and health inequalities in Senegal.

[3] After having been granted a fellowship by the French Institute for Andean Studies to investigate maternal mortality and living conditions among Indian women in Ecuador, Fassin became professor of sociology in 1991 at the University of Paris North.

[5] He himself developed a long-term program exploring the multiple facets of humanitarianism in local and international policies, especially towards the poor, the immigrant and refugees, as well as victims of violence and epidemics.

[10] In parallel, he conducted with Anne-Claire Defossez an ethnography of the border between Italy and France in the Alps, on the basis of which they reconstituted the journeys and experiences of exiles from Africa and the Middle East, research for which they have been granted a writing residence at the French Academy in Rome.

In 2024, he was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, being, after Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Godelier, the sixth French social scientist to receive this prize.

[23] In connection with his work on prison and punishment, Fassin was invited in 2018 to join the New Jersey Criminal Sentencing and Disposition Commission, which has been appointed by the Governor of the State to make recommendations about the penal and corrections system, as Guest Advisor.

A public intellectual, he frequently intervenes in the media on issues related to his research such as immigration, asylum, discrimination, social justice, law and order policies.