Michel Mayor is Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at the Department of Astronomy of the University of Geneva. In 1995 he discovered with Didier Queloz the first giant planet outside the solar system. He is the Principal Investigator of the team having developed the instrument HARPS. Among the outstanding results obtained with that spectrograph we can mention the discovery of the new population of "superearths". With his team, he has detected several hundred extrasolar planets. He is an Associate Member of the French Academy of Science , of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain and of the US National Academy of Science. In 2019 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz received the Nobel Prize in Physics.