Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is a French virologist. Since 1992, she has been the Director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. In 2008, together with Luc Montagnier, who was the director of her laboratory at the Institut Pasteur in the early 80’s, she was awarded the Nobel Prize of medicine for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1983.