Marion Guillou is a French scientist specialized in global food security. Guillou recently wrote proposals for the French government on the agro-ecological transition and on the organization of the French food safety public services. She is a member of the French High Council for Climate.
Early life and education
Guillou completed her engineering training at École Polytechnique, and then specialized in water engineering at École nationale du génie rural, des eaux et des forêts. She completed a PhD in physico-chemistry of biological processes at Nantes University.
Career
Food sciences
Guillou worked on food processes and invented a technique to monitor continuously the bio transformations of food products using physical chemistry sensors such as Nuclear Magnetic low resolution Resonance.
Food safety
She was in charge of the food safety directorate in France from 1996 to 2000. She had to manage the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy crisis, also known as the mad-cow disease, and to propose the new French food safety organization.
Research management
From 1986 to 1989, Guillou was Regional Delegate for Research and Technology in the Region Pays de la Loire. From 2000 to 2012, she was first CEO, then President and CEO of the French National Institute for Agronomic Research where she prioritized research on agriculture, food and environment. She widened the scope of research topics towards global matters. She put in place interdisciplinary meta-programs, for instance on integrated plant protection and consumer practices. From 2008 to 2013, Guillou was the chair of the Board of the prestigious École Polytechnique and during her mandate, Ecole Polytechnique put a greater emphasis on the scientific and technological training, as well as the innovative management and the cooperation with industry. The creation of a new research center on interfaces between biology and engineering sciences was decided and financed and the organization of the Ecole Polytechnique was reformed.
Global involvement
Guillou founded the Joint Programming Initiative on agriculture and climate change with British colleagues and chaired it during the first three years. This initiative, FACCEJPI, now gathers 21 European countries and links at international level with AGMIP and CCAFS. From 2013 to 2016, she was a member of the High-Level Panel Expert reporting to the Committee on World Food Security and a board member of the CGIAR. Starting in 2016, she became a member of the Bioversity board, and starting in 2019, she became a member of the CIAT board. She promoted the , an alliance between those two agricultural research centers.
