David Prangishvili is a Professor at the Pasteur Institute of Paris, and foremost authority on
viruses infecting  Archaea . David Prangishvili gained a Master of Science degree in 1971 at Tbilisi
State University, Georgia, and a PhD (1977) and Habilitation (1989) from Institute of Molecular
Biology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He pioneered research on  Archaea , the
third domain of life, in the USSR and in 1986-1991 he was a head of the department of
Molecular Biology of Archaea at the Georgian Academy of Sciences, Tbilisi. In 1991-2004 he has
worked in Germany, at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry and at the Regensburg
University. David Prangishvili received a prize of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for
Excellence in Science and Technology in 1989. He is a foreign member of the Georgian National
Academy of Sciences, Member of the European Academy of Microbiology, visiting professor of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences. David Prangishvili has affected the field of prokaryotic
virology by the discovery and description of many new species and families of DNA viruses
which infect Archaea. He is an author of more than 180 publications in scientific journals and
books. The results of his research provide new perspectives concerning the diversity and
evolution of viruses and virus-host interactions.