Dr. Casanova received his M.D. from the Paris Descartes University in 1987. He received his Ph.D. in immunology from the Paris Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1992, after being trained at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne. Following a residency in pediatrics and a clinical fellowship in pediatric immunology-hematology, he was appointed a professor of pediatrics at the Necker Medical School in Paris in 1999. There, with Dr. Abel, he cofounded and codirected the Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases in 2001. He was appointed professor at Rockefeller in 2008 and named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2014.

Dr. Casanova was the recipient of the Professor Lucien Dautrebande Pathophysiology Foundation Prize in 2004, the Richard Lounsbery Award in 2008, the E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research in 2010, the InBev Baillet-Latour Health Prize in 2011, the Ilse and Helmut Wachter Foundation Award and the Milstein Award in 2012, and the Robert Koch Prize and the Sanofi – Institut Pasteur Award in 2014. He was elected to the NAS and the NAM in 2015. In 2016, he received the ASCI Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award and the Inserm Grand Prix. In 2017 he was recipient of the AAI-Steinman Award for Human Immunology Research.