For the new academic year, the Collège de France welcomes four new professors (Luigi Rizzi, Samantha Besson, Timothy Gowers and Sonia Garel) and four visiting professors (Chris Bowler, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Yadh Ben Achour and Frédéric Magniez, annual chairs).
Introductions and background...
Born in 1952 in Genoa, Italy, Luigi Rizzi is Professor of Linguistics at the Universities of Siena and Geneva, where he heads the ERC project Syntactic Cartography and Locality in Adult Grammar and Language Acquisition. He is a corresponding member of the British Academy (UK), a member of the Academia Europaea, and an honorary international member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His main field of research is syntactic theory and comparative syntax. In particular, he has contributed to the development of the parametric approach to comparative linguistics, the theory of locality and the study of syntactic mapping.
Luigi Rizzi has held the General Linguistics chair since October 2019. His first lecture will focus on linguistic representations and the mechanisms that generate them.
Born in 1973, Samantha Besson is Professor of International and European Law at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She has been co-director of the European Law Institute since 2005, after spending many years as a doctoral researcher and then postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University.
Her research and publications focus on general international law, EU institutional law and legal philosophy, with a particular emphasis on human rights law and theory. A visiting professor at Duke Law School, Catolica Global School of Lawin Lisbon, Harvard Law School and Penn Law School, she has also provided various lectures for The Hague Academy of International Law. Since 2017, she has been a committee member of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Samantha Besson has held the International Law of Institutions chair since October 2019. In 2021, she will give her first lecture entitled "Diligence and negligence in international law".
Timothy Gowers was born in Marlborough, UK, in 1963. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Béla Bollobás. After two years as a research fellow at Trinity College (Cambridge), he became a lecturer at University College London, before returning to Cambridge in 1995, first as a senior lecturer, then from 1998 as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics. He was a visiting professor at Princeton between 2000 and 2002.
Since 2009, he has been a Research Professor of the Royal Society. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he was laureate of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris chair. He received a prize from the European Mathematical Society in 1996, and a Fields Medal in 1998. In 2012, he was knighted for services to mathematics. He is the author of Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction, and the senior editor of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics.
He was appointed Professor of Combinatorics at the Collège de France in May 2020, and will give his first lecture, "Outils de la combinatorics", in 2021.
Sonia Garel is a neurobiologist and heads the Brain Development and Plasticity team at the Institut de biologie de l'École normale supérieure in Paris (France). Her research focuses on the mechanisms that control the assembly of forebrain neuronal circuits during embryogenesis and postnatal development, with a particular interest in interactions with the immune system and the environment.
After studying at AgroParisTech and obtaining a PhD in developmental biology in Paris, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She joined Inserm in 2003, and has headed the Brain Development and Plasticity team since 2008. Her work has been recognized by several awards, including the European Young Investigator Award (EURYI), the ERC Consolidation Program, the Antoine Lacassagne Prize, the Brixham Foundation Prize for Neuroscience, the NRJ-Institut de France Foundation Grand Prize, and she is a member of EMBO.
With the support of the Fondation Jean-François et Marie-Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre.
Chris Bowler is Director of Research at the CNRS and Director of the Plant and Algal Genomics Laboratory at the Biology Institute of the École normale supérieure in Paris. He obtained his PhD from Ghent University in Belgium, followed by postdoctoral studies at Rockefeller University in New York. In 1994, he set up his own laboratory working on signaling in higher plants and marine diatoms at the Stazione Zoologicade Naples, Italy, and in 2002 took up his current position in Paris.
He has been a member of EMBO since 1995, received the CNRS Silver Medal in 2010, ERC Advanced Awards in 2012 and 2018 and the Fondation Louis D. de l'Institut de France Prize in 2015. In 2018, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Agriculture. His main research interest is understanding the response of plants and marine diatoms to environmental signals, through functional and comparative genomics. He is one of the scientific coordinators of the Tara Océan project to explore the biodiversity, ecology and evolution of plankton in the world's oceans.
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud was born in 1962. An alumnus of the École normale supérieure, he is Chairman and Chief Research Officer of Capital Fund Management. A specialist in the statistical physics of disordered media, he is one of the pioneers of "econophysics", a discipline that seeks to apply the concepts and methods of physics to economic systems and financial markets.
He is the author of over 350 scientific publications, including several books and journal articles. He was awarded a CNRS silver medal in 1996 and the Quant of the Year award in 2017 and 2018. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 2018.
At the Collège de France, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud will hold the annual Technological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt Chair. He will give a lecture entitled "From statistical physics to the social sciences: the challenges of multidisciplinarity".
Pr Yadh Ben Achour was born on June1, 1945 in La Marsa. He studied law in Tunis and Paris, before obtaining his doctorate in public law in 1974. A member of the Tunisian Constitutional Council, he resigned in 1992. From 1993 to 1999, he was Dean of the Faculty of Legal Sciences at Carthage University.
After the Tunisian revolution, Yadh Ben Achour was appointed President of the High Instance of the Revolution. He is a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
In 2020-2021, Yadh Ben Achour will occupy the annual Francophone Worlds Chair, in partnership with the Agence universitaire de la francophonie (AUF), to give a lecture entitled "Les révolutions dans la pensée et dans l'histoire des faits".
A former student at ENS Cachan, Frédéric Magniez has a degree in mathematics and a doctorate in computer science. His thesis was awarded the Prix de l'Association Française d'Informatique Théorique in 2000. He then joined the CNRS and worked at the Laboratoire de recherche en informatique (LRI) at Université Paris Sud, before joining the Institut de recherche en informatique fondamentale (IRIF) at Université de Paris in 2010. His research focuses on the design and analysis of probabilistic algorithms for processing large masses of data, as well as the development of quantum computing, with particular emphasis on algorithms, cryptography and its interaction with physics.
A professor at École polytechnique from 2003 to 2015, Frédéric Magniez co-constructed the school's first lecture dedicated to quantum computing. In 2006, he created and led the national Quantum Computing working group, which currently brings together 20 research teams. From 2013 to 2017, he headed the Algorithms and Complexity team, whose quantum computing research is recognized worldwide. In 2015, he became deputy director of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris, a network of excellence bringing together 1,200 researchers in mathematical and computer sciences, before taking over as director of IRIF in 2018.
