Legion of Honor awarded to Marco Antonio Zago by French President

The award was presented to the President of FAPESP by Emmanuel Lenain, France’s ambassador to Brazil.

Agência FAPESP – Emmanuel Macron, President of France, has awarded the Legion of Honor to Marco Antonio Zago, President of FAPESP, for his contributions to the building of closer ties between France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and FAPESP, support for creation of the dual degree in law by the University of São Paulo (USP) and Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, and the establishment of Institut Pasteur de São Paulo.

The award was presented to Zago on June 20 by Emmanuel Lenain, France’s ambassador to Brazil, in a ceremony held at the home of Yves Teyssier d’Orfeuil, the French Consul General in São Paulo, and attended by family, friends and distinguished guests.

The Legion of Honor was created by Napoleon in 1802. It is awarded to French citizens and foreigners to acknowledge their “exceptional merit” and services rendered to France or its ideals, Lenain explained, adding that collaboration has been the hallmark of Zago’s activities from the establishment of the Center for Cell-Based Therapy (CTC) – a Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center (RIDC) funded by FAPESP at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Ribeirão Preto – to his leadership of FAPESP. “You have remained a friend of France every step of the way,” he said.

“You greatly enhanced the relations between France and USP by creating the dual law degree with Lyon university,” and in 2017 when, as Rector of USP, “you signed the protocol of an agreement that permitted the establishment of Institut Pasteur on USP’s campus in São Paulo.”

“The latest initiative is the creation of the International Research Center [IRC] at USP, which FAPESP is committed to support and which will play an important role in bilateral collaboration,” Lenain said. The IRC will be the fifth center created by CNRS in partnership with a university (read more about the IRC at: agencia.fapesp.br/51330). 

“Through you we also salute FAPESP, an institution admired as unique in the world, in the international sphere, thanks to São Paulo’s investment in the development of agriculture, artificial intelligence and healthcare, among other fields,” he said.

“Alongside your intellectual and academic merit, we pay tribute to your person and the bold spirit with which you have always honored initiatives of all kinds. As I have witnessed, your intellectual and human curiosity reaches far beyond the field of science, for you are an excellent draftsman.”

Zago expressed thanks for the honor, which he said was “very significant to me personally”. “My relationship with French science and the French academic world began at the Center for Research on Hemoglobinopathies at Henri-Mondor Hospital in Créteil. Until then, my umbilical connection had been with British research. After that visit, we established in Brazil an approach to these red cell disorders on the basis of DNA alterations and polymorphisms,” he said.

The key step was meeting two young researchers in 1980 at Paris Diderot University’s Robert-Debrê Hospital, which had recently been opened. Their names are Jacques Elion and Rajagopal Krishnamoorthy. “Since then we’ve conducted countless projects together, with support from CAPES [the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel], FAPESP and USP. We’ve promoted student exchanges involving many PhD candidates and postdocs between our labs in France and Brazil. And we’ve jointly published 12 scientific articles,” he said.

Zago mentioned another important collaboration, this time with Éliane Gluckman, professor of hematology at Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris and a world pioneer of umbilical cord blood transplantation. “A vital part of this relationship was her assistant Vanderson Rocha, who was to become full professor of hematology at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School. Gluckman and I jointly supervised a researcher who played an active part in the first successful CAR T-cell treatment in Latin America,” he said.

As the head of CNPq, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (an arm of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation), as Rector of USP and as President of FAPESP, promoting scientific, technological and cultural collaboration between Brazil and France has been his priority, he stressed. 

“An agreement with France’s Natural History Museum gave rise to Brazil’s Reflora Virtual Herbarium, for example. And there have been many bilateral visits, accords, meetings, seminars, and joint calls for research proposals with the universities of Lyon, Paris-Descartes, Paris-Diderot, PSL, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and SciencePo.”

Zago also mentioned the Triangular International Higher Education Partnership (PITES) between USP and French universities in Lyon and Saint Étienne to enable Brazilian students to obtain the licence en droit, a law degree recognized across Europe – an initiative led by Fernando Menezes, FAPESP’s Chief administrative Officer – and FAPESP Week in Paris and Lyon in 2019.

“President Macron’s visit to Institut Pasteur at USP was the culmination of ten years of negotiation and hard work leading to the establishment of this branch of the Pasteur in São Paulo, and I want to recognize the important endeavors of Paola Minoprio to make it happen,” Zago said, referring to its Executive Director.

“We recently launched the Joint Program of Research on the South Atlantic, and last week, in collaboration with Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we relaunched the Brazilian Portuguese Lectureship Program for French universities. In May we took part in a seminar on Brazil’s Indigenous languages at the Collège de France, and next year we’ll participate in an exhibition on the Amazon at Quai Branly and the Inovatec expo. In 2025, we’ll also hold a new FAPESP Week in France.

“Just yesterday, on June 19, we opened the France-São Paulo workshop on scientific collaboration in medicine and began talks on a partnership between Institut Curie and the Center for Cell-Based Therapy in Ribeirão Preto, my former lab.”

Zago ended his speech with the Legion of Honor’s motto: Honneur et Patrie (Honor and Country).