former FEMS President, member of EAM

J.-C. Piffaretti obtained in 1974 a Ph.D. degree in biological science from the Geneva University, Switzerland. Since the beginning of his professional career, he has been overlapping general and medical microbiology. From 1981 to 2006, he was deputy director of the Cantonal Institute of Microbiology of the Canton Ticino, Switzerland, where he supervised the clinical laboratory (he has the Swiss FAMH certificate in laboratory medicine, medical microbiology). During this period, he headed his own research group financed mostly by the Swiss National Foundation and published about 100 scientific articles, the majority of them in international peer reviewed journals. He also received several mandates from the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health. He also served as an expert to the Swiss Accreditation Service for the medical microbiology laboratories.

J.-C. Piffaretti has been organizing numerous courses, workshops, meetings and congresses in microbiology. In 2006, he chaired the organising committee of the 2nd FEMS congress of European microbiologists, in Madrid. In September 2010 he was elected vice-president of FEMS (Federation of European Microbiological Societies) and president in 2013. In December 2016, he was elected fellow of EAM (European Academy of Microbiology).

In 1993, J.-C. Piffaretti has been appointed associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, where he taught microbiology to the pharmacy and biology students until 2011. From 2009 to 2013 he also taught microbiology to the medicine students of the University of Fribourg.