Michel Pichon, Biological Oceanographer, University Professor, Officer in the Order of "Palmes Académiques", is an expert on coral reefs, which he has studied over the last 50 years. He was research leader of several coral reefs research teams, operating in most major reef areas in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean (Mascarenes, Comoros, Madagascar, Maldives and the seas around Arabia), and the Pacific Ocean.
He has been based for more than 22 years in Australia, first at James Cook University. Townsville, then as Deputy Director, Australian Institute of Marine Science. He then did work principally on the Great Barrier Reef, with his students and Australian colleagues, but also elsewhere in the Pacific in cooperation with American, Japanese and French teams. He has published more than one hundred scientific papers in international scientific journals, mostly on coral reefs, and co-authored four books on the reef corals of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
He is a member of the scientific board of the "Fondation Albert 1er Prince de Monaco", Council member of the International Society for Reef Studies and scientific expert with the Global Marine program, International Union for Conservation of Nature. He now lives in Australia, where he is a Tropical Marine Consultant and Honorary Research Associate at the Museum of Tropical Queensland, in Townsville.