Appointment of a new coordination team for the National RARe Infrastructure

Position infrastructure as a cross-sectoral actor supporting the agroecological transition, climate change mitigation, and the overall health of ecosystems

 I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Michèle Tixier-Boichard for her guidance and for having initiated, built, and developed this infrastructure. Through our discussions, RARe has struck me as a very dynamic and vibrant organization, driven by deeply committed communities. RARe brings together valuable biological resources, expertise, data, and scientific communities. In this new role, my primary goal is to listen to the Biological Resource Centers that keep RARe alive, understand their expectations, and help strengthen the ties between them and the various pillars, with the support of institutional partners. A key challenge will be to leverage the biological resources preserved and documented in RARe in order to position the infrastructure as a multidisciplinary player supporting the agroecological transition, climate change mitigation, and the overall health of ecosystems. This will involve further integrating the expertise of the various pillars around integrative scientific questions and enhancing data interoperability to better link information related to biological resources. Together with all RARe stakeholders, I look forward to continuing this collaborative effort and helping to strengthen our infrastructure’s role in addressing today’s major scientific and societal challenges. "

Julia Buitink, Research Director at INRAE 

Julia Buitink studied at Wageningen University and completed part of her master’s program at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Colorado, United States. This experience sparked her interest in the mechanisms that enable organisms and cells to survive in dry conditions. She earned her Ph.D. in plant sciences and biophysics from Wageningen University in 2000, focusing on the physicochemical basis of seed longevity. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Angers, she was recruited to INRAE in 2002, and since 2009, she has been a research director at the Institute for Horticulture and Seed Research in Angers. Her research focuses on the influence of the environment, during development, on the molecular mechanisms that control seed desiccation tolerance, longevity, and vigor. By leveraging genetic diversity and functional genomics, particularly in legumes, her work contributes to a better understanding of and improvements in seed performance in the face of climate change and agroecological transitions. She is a former president of the International Society for Seed Science, scientific director of the Tournesol–Soja Biological Resources Center, and head of the Europe division for INRAE’s Department of Plant Biology and Breeding until the end of 2026.

Operational coordination of an infrastructure that brings together the life sciences: a natural fit

For this five-year term, I will be working alongside Julia Buitink, scientific coordinator (UMR IRHS, Angers). We have already begun discussions and identified initial areas of focus, and I am looking forward to this collaboration. I am also proud to build on the work initiated and developed by Roland Cottin, and to continue the efforts led by Michèle Tixier-Boichard across all the fields that RARe brings together.
Taking on this role ties in with a thread that has run through my career from the very beginning: it was at the BRG that I learned that genetic resources cannot be managed in isolation. This cross-disciplinary, cross-stakeholder, and cross-national approach has become a deeply held conviction and the driving force behind my entire career. RARe, by its very nature, embodies exactly that. Taking on the operational coordination of an infrastructure that brings together the life sciences feels like a natural fit for me, and that is what makes this new role particularly appealing.”

Eléonore Charvolin-Lemaire, Senior Design Engineer  

As a Senior Research Engineer in the GABI unit (UMR 1313, Department of Animal Genetics, INRAE), Éléonore succeeds Roland Cottin as the operational coordinator of the RARe infrastructure—the French Network of Biological Resource Centers for research in biology, agronomy, and the environment. 
Her career has been entirely focused on genetic resources, starting with her education: she holds a Master’s degree in “Biodiversity Management: Methodologies for the Study and Utilization of Genetic Resources” (Pierre and Marie Curie University), she began her career at the Bureau of Genetic Resources (BRG), coordinating animal genetic resource files and playing an active role in monitoring funded projects as well as organizing BRG symposia that brought together all types of biological resources. There, she gained a cross-cutting perspective on genetic resources and multi-stakeholder coordination before joining the Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB), where she developed a lasting conviction: collective acculturation is an essential lever for bringing biodiversity to life in research. She joined INRAE in 2010 as part of GABI, where she developed expertise in scientific outreach and public policy support at both the national and European levels.
On the international stage, she has chaired the “Documentation and Information” working group of the ERFP (European Network for Animal Genetic Resources) since 2023, contributes to FAO/CGRFA bodies, and participated in the H2020 GenRes Bridge project. In 2025, she published a paper as lead author in the "Genetic Resources Journal" on transboundary breeds.