By decree of the President of the Republic dated May 18, 2020, and on the proposal of the Board of Professors,Ms. Sonia Garel and Mr. Timothy Gowers are appointed Professors of the Collège de France, respectively in the " Neurobiology and the Immune System" and " Combinatorics"chairs , as of the 2020-2021 academic year.
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 prizes and 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.
She now holds the "Neurobiology and the Immune System" Chair.
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 Royal Society Research Professor. 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 elected Professor at the Collège de France in May 2020.
He now holds the Combinatorics Chair.
