 Charnay was recruited by Inserm in 1980.After obtaining his PhD in 1981, he did a postdoctoral fellowship in Tom Maniatis' laboratory at Harvard University (Cambridge, USA), where he studied the molecular basis for the regulation of globin gene expression.In 1984, he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg (Germany) as a group leader and focused on the study of transcription factors that played a decisive role in establishing the nervous system during development.