Nalini Anantharaman was born in 1976 and grew up in Orléans. She studied mathematics at the École normale supérieure (Paris) and the Université Paris-Sud. After obtaining a doctorate at the University of Paris  6in 2000 under the supervision of François Ledrappier, she became a lecturer at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, then in 2006 a CNRS research fellow and professor in the " Hadamard "chairat the École Polytechnique. From 2009 to 2022, she was a professor at the University of Paris-Sud (Orsay) and then at the University of Strasbourg. She made several long-term stays at Berkeley (2009, 2015, 2019) and at Princeton IAS (2013). She holds a Chair of Mathematics at the University of Strasbourg Institute of Advance Study (USIAS). She was appointed Professor at the Collège de France in October 2022, holding the Spectral Geometry Chair.

Nalini Anantharaman's research focuses on the geometric description of wave propagation. It combines dynamical systems theory, partial differential equations, symplectic and Riemannian geometry, and probability theory. In particular, the aim is to understand how the properties of geodesics, seen from the angle of ergodic theory, can be used to describe standing waves and the spectrum of elliptic operators of the type " laplacian " or " Schrödinger operators ". The term " quantum chaos " is used to link the chaotic character of geodesics to the disordered character of waves. She has also worked on wave propagation on large graphs, demonstrating delocalization phenomena, and is currently working on random geometry models.