François Taddei wrote a report on creativity and education for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (alias OECD) entitled: “Training creative and collaborative knowledge-builders: a major challenge for 21st century education” that can be downloaded on http://creativity.blog.lemonde.fr/files/2009/04/ocde-f_taddei.1239561869.pdf Over the last five years, as an educator, he has created the CRI (Center for Research and Interdisciplinary) in Paris, which offers a Master’s degree (Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life sciences, AIV), a doctoral school (Frontiers of Life, FdV), supported by the Liliane Bettencourt PhD program, and holds chairs funded by Orange and Axa. CRI’s main role is to promote new pedagogies to help creative students take initiatives and develop their research projects, with the help of mentors, research institutions, private companies, and foundations, such as the Bettencourt Foundation, which has supported many student-created activities. These activities range from the first French synthetic biology team (which won the Foundational Research Award at its first participation in the MIT-sponsored iGEM competition) to the “Paris-Montagne” science festival and the “Science Académie,” an outreach program that allows high schools students from disfavored neighborhoods to discover the creativity of science while spending their vacations in research labs. As a scientist he heads the Evolutionary Systems Biology team at a unit of the French National Institute of Health & Medical Research (INSERM) in Paris-Descartes University’s Medical School. After a generalist scientific education, with majors in physics and biology at the École Polytechnique,” he became a tenured higher civil servant at the French Ministry of Agriculture, before earning a PhD in genetics, studying the evolution of the rate of evolution with Miroslav Radman. After postdoctoral training with John Maynard-Smith, for the last 10 years, his research team has been studying innovation and degeneracy in biological systems. This work has produced many publications in generalist scientific journals, and has been recognized by several awards, (the European Young Investigator award, the Human Frontier Science Program award, the INSERM Award for Fundamental Research, and the Liliane Bettencourt Life Science Award) and allowed him to receive successively a Chair from Orange labs and one from Axa Research fund.