Dr Yves Queneau, Research Director at CNRS, is Head of the Organic and Bioorganic Chemistry Laboratory at INSA Lyon, Deputy-Director of the “Institut de Chimie et Biochimie Moléculaires et Supramoléculaires” (ICBMS), University of Lyon, France and Honorary Professor at the University of Hull, UK. After his doctorate on aqueous Diels-Alder reactions involving glycodienes under the supervision of Professor André Lubineau (Orsay, 1988) he was appointed as CNRS fellow and worked on cycloaddition reactions towards complex sugars. He then spent one year in 1992 in Professor Samuel J. Danishefsky’s group in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, USA. He later moved to Lyon in a mixed CNRS-industrial research facility dedicated to sucrose chemistry (1995-2003) before joining its present position where he develops his research in organic and biological chemistry with a particular interest for the use of carbohydrates as renewable raw materials.