With education in veterinary sciences (doctorate), nutrition (MSc), public health (MSc) and development geography (PhD), Patrick Caron is specialist of food systems, with focus on controversy analysis and multi-scale governance.

He is Director of the Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on Transitions (https://makit.edu.umontpellier.fr/en/home/), Chair of Agropolis International (https://www.agropolis.fr/Who-we-are), Vice-Chair of the CGIAR System Board (https://www.cgiar.org/).

He joined CIRAD (https://www.cirad.fr/) in 1988 and has been Director for research and strategy (2010-2016). He was Chair of the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the UN Committee on world Food Security (2015-2019), Vice President of the University of Montpellier (2019-2023) and member of the Science Group of the 2021 UN Food System Summit. He is actively engaged in the Montpellier Process, a collective and community-owned process convened and curated by an alliance of partners whose aim is to demonstrate more effective, more iterative, and better coordinated Science-to-Policy Interfaces (SPIs) across scales (global, national and local), across sectors (environment, health, people) and across knowledge systems.