Jean-Louis Banères received his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Montpellier in 1994, where he worked on the structure of DNA-histone complexes under the supervision of Joseph Parello. This was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla (CA, USA), directed by Erkki Ruoslahti, on the molecular bases of cell adhesion (1994-1996). He was then appointed as a research associate in the same Institute (1996-1997). In 1998, he was recruited as a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory of Biomolecular Chemistry and Biological Interactions in Montpellier, where he started working on the molecular bases of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR)-mediated signaling using leukotriene receptors as a model. He then joined IBMM at its creation in 2007, where he established the team and started a new program aimed at elucidating how ghrelin receptor-mediated signaling proceeds at the molecular and cellular levels.