Michèle Tixier-Boichard, PhD, DVM, was born in Paris in 1959. She is married and has two children and one grand-daughter. She is a senior scientist at INRAE (the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment) where she has been working in animal genetics since 1985, mainly on chickens, after her PhD on pig breeding, also performed at INRAE.

She is a member of the World’s Poultry Science Association since 1989 and chaired the Working group ‘Breeding and Genetics’ of the European Federation between 1994 and 2002. With the French branch, she organised the European Symposium of Poultry Genetics in France in 2017.

She was elected Vice-President of the European Federation in 1998 and has been an elected Vice-president of the WPSA board from 2004 to 2016. She currently is vice-president of the French branch and is chairing the organizing committee of the 26th World’s Poultry Congress to be held in Paris in 2022. She supervised the production of the 6 minutes video celebrating the centenary of WPC in 2021.

Her personal interests include genetics of egg production traits, molecular characterisation of major genes and particularly feather colour genes, molecular assessment of genetic diversity in chickens, characterisation and conservation of local breeds. She published 138 papers in peer-reviewed journals and supervised 12 theses. Since February 2010 she is chairing the board of the French National Gene bank. She chairs since 2016 the French infrastructure of biological resource centres for agriculture research and coordinates its branch for domestic animals, CRB-Anim, created in 2012.