With education in veterinary sciences (doctorate), nutrition (MSc), public health (MSc) and development geography (PhD), Patrick Caron is specialist of food systems, with focus on controversy analysis and multi-scale governance.
Researcher at Cirad (https://www.cirad.fr/), he is co-Chair of Agropolis International (https://www.agropolis.fr/) and Chair of the development institute of Paris Sorbonne University.
He joined CIRAD in 1988 and has been Director for research and strategy (2010-2016). He was Chair of the High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the UN Committee on world Food Security (2015-2019), Vice President of the University of Montpellier (2019-2023) and Director of the Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on Transitions (MAK’IT, 2018-2024), and member of the Science Group of the 2021 UN Food System Summit. He is a member of the CGIAR Integrated Partnership Board (Vice Chair from 2023 to 2025 and Chair in 2025) and of the French Academies of Technology and of Agriculture.
He is actively engaged in the Montpellier Process, a collective and community-owned process convened and curated by an alliance of partners whose aim is to demonstrate more effective, more iterative, and better coordinated Science-to-Policy Interfaces (SPIs) across scales (global, national and local), across sectors (environment, health, people) and across knowledge systems.