IC Professor appointed to the French Academy of Sciences

Anne-Marie Kermarrec © 2024 EPFL/Alain Herzog - CC-BY-SA 4.0

Anne-Marie Kermarrec © 2024 EPFL/Alain Herzog - CC-BY-SA 4.0

EPFL’s Anne-Marie Kermarrec is one of eighteen new members who will join the prestigious French Academy of Sciences in 2025.

The French Academy of Sciences has announced the appointment of eighteen new members for 2025, including IC Professor Anne-Marie Kermarrec, head of the Scalable Computing Systems Laboratory and EPFL Associate Vice-president for Doctoral and Lifelong Education.

Before joining EPFL in January 2020, Kermarrec was the CEO of Mediego a startup that she founded in April 2015, providing content personalization services for online publishers. From 2004-2015 she was Research Director at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology.

Kermarrec received the Montpetit Award in 2011 and the Innovation Award in 2017 from the French Academy of Science, was elected to the European Academy in 2013 and named an ACM Fellow in 2016. Her research interests are in large-scale distributed systems, epidemic algorithms, peer to peer networks and system support for machine learning.

With the admission of its eighteen new members, for the first time since its creation in 1666 a majority of the Academy’s members are women. The Academy says it is celebrating this historic moment which marks a significant advance towards greater representation of women in all fields of research and innovation.

In 2021, Kermarrec published a book about women in computing, titled Numérique, compter avec les femmes. The book draws upon her personal experiences in academia and entrepreneurship, and in her own words, touches on everything from “the small number of women Nobel laureates” to “biases in AI”.

The results of the recent entry elections will be ratified by an official decree from the President of France with a reception ceremony taking place in June 2025.

Strengthened by its new members, the French Academy of Sciences reaffirms its commitment to: encourage, support and protect the spirit of scientific research; contribute to scientific advances and their applications; disseminate knowledge in France and abroad; and, reflect on the political, ethical and societal issues linked to science, now and in the future.


Author: Tanya Petersen

Source: Equal Opportunity Office

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