Henri Atlan is Professor Emeritus of Biophysics at the University of Paris VI and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and director of research in Philosophy of Biology at the EHESS in Paris.

He has set up and is currently director of the Human Biology Research Center at the Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem, where experimental and theoretical research are being conducted in the fields of medical imaging, cell biophysics, and immunology with clinical applications to autoimmune diseases and Aids. He is the author of numerous works in cell biology and immunology, information theory, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of biology. He has developed a theory of self-organisation based on a Complexity from Noise principle and several models of self-organisation applied to biology. He is currently chief-editor of the journal ComPlexUs.