Jean Paul Thiery is currently Research Director Emeritus at the Institut Gustave Roussy Comprehensive Cancer Center at Villejuif, and at the CNRS unit Matter and Complex Systems in Paris, France, as well as a Visiting Professor at the School of Medicine of National University of Singapore (NUS), and at CCBIO University of Bergen, Norway.
Jean Paul serves as a Scientific Advisor of the Dean of Medical School NUS, Singapore, and in a number of other Institutions worldwide. He was until June 2015, Professor and Head of the Biochemistry Department, School of Medicine at NUS. He has also served a joint appointment as Research Director at IMCB A*STAR Singapore, and Senior Principal Investigator at the Cancer Science Institute at NUS.
Jean Paul is credited as the first to propose that EMT control invasion and dissemination while the reverse process, MET, is required for the development of clinically detectable metastases in carcinoma. His current research's focus is to unravel the mechanisms of invasion and metastasis of carcinoma cells, while his seminal contributions to bladder carcinoma studies have led to the discovery of the molecular mechanisms underlying the formation of superficial or invasive tumors. Currently, his research is focusing on oncogenomics and the creation of functional approaches to characterize bladder, lung breast, and ovarian carcinoma progression- with the ultimate goal to apply EMT-based therapeutic approaches in the near future.
He is an EMBO and Academia Europea member. He has been made Chevalier (Knight) in the order the Legion d'Honneur , the highest distinction in France, in 2009.