Nicholas Ayache is Director of Research at Inria (Institut national de recherche en informatique et automatique) in Sophia Antipolis, where he leads the Asclepios research team, specialized in the analysis and simulation of digital medical images.
Born in Paris on November1 , 1958, Nicholas Ayache holds a civil engineering degree from the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne (1980), a Master of Science (1981) from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), a PhD (1983) and a State Thesis (1988) from the Université de Paris-Sud (Orsay). He has been an Inria researcher since 1982, first at Rocquencourt, then at Sophia Antipolis since 1992. In 2007, he was a visiting researcher in the United States at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. He has lectured at the École Centrale de Paris and at a number of major French schools and universities. He has also been Scientific Director of Strasbourg's Institut hospitalo-universitaire (IHU) since its creation in January 2012.
His current research focuses on the automated analysis of medical images and the construction of personalized digital patient models to support medicine and surgery. Considered one of the pioneers in this field of research, he is also co-founder and editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Medical Image Analysis (Elsevier Science). His previous research (1981-1988) focused on the artificial vision of autonomous robots, and is published in the book Artificial Vision for Mobile Robots (MIT-Press, 1991). Nicholas Ayache has published around 400 scientific articles with over 25,000 citations (Google scholar). He has edited a dozen books, including Computational Models of the Human Body (Elsevier) and Biomedical Image Analysis (Springer) with N. Paragios and J. Duncan. He holds 12 international patents. He has supervised 58 PhD students, most of whom are now working in the field of computational medical imaging.