Simon Wain-Hobson is an emeritus professor of Virology at the Institute Pasteur, Paris. Wain-Hobson obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1977, served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1977 to 1980, and thereafter moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He and his colleagues were the first to sequence the genome of the virus that causes AIDS. Wain-Hobson won the André Lwoff prize in 1996 and Athena prize from the French Academy of Sciences in 2007 and is Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. Wain-Hobson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2022 for his services to the field of virology.