Pascal Mayer is a French biophysicist and entrepreneur specializing in biomolecular analyses for diagnostics, predictive medicine and drug discovery.

He graduated in 1988 with a Master's degree (DEA) in Molecular Biology from the Louis Pasteur University[5] of Strasbourg, where he obtained his PhD in Macromolecular Biophysics in 1991 His thesis was devoted to the development of an automated apparatus for measuring electrical birefringence on gel and to the experimental study of DNA dynamics during pulsed-field electrophoresis.

During a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Paul Pascal Research Center of the CNRS, from 1994 to 1996, he invented a method and wrote software to analyze video-microscopy images of blurred moving objects (DNA molecules) using spatio-temporal correlation maps.

[6] These patents have enabled the creation of a rapid, robust and inexpensive DNA sequencing technique (one day and around $600 for the resequencing of a complete human genome), which is now used on a large scale.

In this respect, Pascal Mayer received the Breakthrough Prize in life sciences category in 2022 (alongside these two British scientists)[7] and the Canada Gairdner International Award in 2024.