Visiting Professors
Yvan Bonnassieux is a professor at École polytechnique working on thin-film and flexible electronics. With Columbia's Ioannis Kymissis, he has led Alliance-supported research on unconventional sensors and light sources for point-of-care detection, mobile healthcare and implantable medical technologies, aiming at conformable, energy-efficient biochips capable of stimulating and recording vital signals at high resolution.
Yinon Cohen is the Yosef H. Yerushalmi Professor of Israel and Jewish Studies in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, which he chaired from 2011 to 2014. His research interests include labor markets, social stratification, international migration and Israel. Before Columbia, he was a professor at Tel Aviv University, where he directed the Horowitz Institute on Society and Economy and the Golda Meir Institute for Social and Labor Research. He holds a PhD in Sociology from SUNY Stony Brook.
Yasutomo J. Uemura is a Professor of Physics at Columbia University. He received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and D.Sc. in physics from the University of Tokyo and was an associate physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory before joining Columbia in 1988. His research uses muon spin relaxation (μSR) and neutron scattering to study magnetism and superconductivity. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the Packard Fellowship and the Yamazaki Prize of the International Society for μSR Spectroscopy.
Yann Toma is an artist and professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He co-led an Alliance project bringing together artists, mathematicians and social scientists to design participatory online visualization platforms that empower citizens to produce and use data to transform their local environment, with a flagship participatory art project on urban transformation for sustainability.
Xiaobo Lü is Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, which he directed from 2001 to 2007; he also directed Columbia Global Centers - East Asia (2008-2010). His research focuses on comparative political corruption and governance and contemporary Chinese politics. As an Alliance short-term visiting professor at Paris 1 in April 2014, he taught a course on Chinese politics and society and worked with geographer Thierry Sanjuan.
Wolfram Schlenker is a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs whose research focuses on environmental and agricultural economics. He has worked extensively on the effect of weather, especially extreme heat, on agricultural yields, and on the implications for food prices and socio-economic spillovers such as refugee flows to the European Union. During his Alliance visiting professorship at École polytechnique, he pursued research on food price volatility, including how spatially correlated weather shocks affect global food prices.
Vincent Lépinay is a sociologist at Sciences Po. For his Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia (spring 2027), he proposed the course "Complicated Bedfellows: The common knowledge of academics and journalists," which introduces students to a computational approach to the sociology of ideas by collecting and analyzing data on the circulation of people and ideas between France and the United States.
Timothy Frye is a professor of political science at Columbia University specializing in Russian and post-Soviet politics. As an Alliance short-term visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he taught "Politics in Contemporary Russia," a course that uses the literature on hybrid and authoritarian regimes to analyze political dynamics in Russia, including public opinion, presidential approval, elites and opposition, in comparative and historical perspective.
Thomas Lindemann is a professor of political science and international relations at École polytechnique (since 2015) and Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin. He holds the agrégation in political science and a PhD from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and has taught at Sciences Po, Paris 1, Bordeaux IV and Toulouse 1, with visiting positions in Istanbul, Staffordshire and Beirut. His research covers international relations and the history of international relations.
Thomas Clay is a Professor of Private Law at the Sorbonne Law School (where he teaches Arbitration Law and Alternative Dispute Resolution. In 2020, he was also the University’s acting President and, in 2022, he founded Sorbonne Arbitrage.
Thomas Bourveau joined Columbia University in 2018. He previously served on the faculty at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He obtained in PhD in Management Science from HEC Paris. He teaches financial statement analysis in Columbia Business School's MBA program. Professor Bourveau primarily conducts empirical research. His research lies at the intersection of accounting, law, and economics. He is most interested in evaluating the implications of regulatory interventions in financial markets, often through the role of information disclosure.
Sudipta Kaviraj is a professor of Indian politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. With Christophe Jaffrelot of Sciences Po, he co-led an Alliance project on Indian conservatism, a powerful tradition long overshadowed by the liberal and socialist nationalism of India's ruling parties, bringing together scholars from several disciplines to study its core principles, internal diversity and influence on Indian politics.
Stéphanie Balme is a research professor at Sciences Po (CERI) specializing in Chinese law and politics. Her research includes fieldwork filming mediations, hearings and trials in basic-level courts in China, towards publications and a research documentary on the evolution of ordinary justice during the Hu Jintao years (2002-2012). As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia, she proposed a course on "Chinese Law and Political Institutions" and lectures on China, law and human rights.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor of French and philosophy at Columbia University. With Françoise Blum of Paris 1, he led the Alliance-supported African Philosophy and Politics Project, "Corpora and Doctrines of African Socialisms: A Global Historical Framing," which brought together American, French and African partners through workshops at Columbia and Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, leading to an edited volume on the circulation and hybridity of African socialisms.
Siarhei Finski is a mathematician at École polytechnique working on asymptotic problems in complex geometry. His Alliance short-term visiting professorship at Columbia was designed to deepen exchanges with Professor Duong H. Phong and colleagues in complex geometry, and included a seminar talk and a graduate seminar introducing students to asymptotic problems in complex geometry, including his recent work on the semiclassical Ohsawa-Takegoshi extension theorem.
Sharon Di is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University, where she directs the DitecT (Data & innovative technology-driven Transportation) Lab, specializing in transportation systems optimization and machine learning, and serves on the Smart Cities Center committee of the Data Science Institute. Her Alliance short-term visiting professorship at École polytechnique (2024), hosted by Claudia D'Ambrosio, aimed to develop collaborations with colleagues there working on related topics.
Scott Barrett is a Columbia University economist specializing in climate change and international cooperation. He has long-standing ties with European institutions: he serves on the advisory board of IDDRI at Sciences Po, taught a PhD course at Paris 1 in 2015 and has participated in the Alliance Summer School. As an Alliance visiting professor at École polytechnique during his 2016-17 sabbatical, he worked on a new book on climate change, which he describes as the biggest collective action problem in human history.
Scott Barrett is a Columbia University economist specializing in climate change and international cooperation. He has long-standing ties with European institutions: he serves on the advisory board of IDDRI at Sciences Po, taught a PhD course at Paris 1 in 2015 and has participated in the Alliance Summer School. As an Alliance visiting professor at École polytechnique during his 2016-17 sabbatical, he worked on a new book on climate change, which he describes as the biggest collective action problem in human history.
Saskia Sassen is a sociologist at Columbia University and a member of its Committee on Global Thought. In Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2006), she argues that today's foundational transformations take place largely inside national environments and institutions, through denationalizing as well as globalizing dynamics. She is the author of eight books, translated into twenty-one languages, and has taken part in large collective projects such as The Urban Age. She was an Alliance one-month visiting professor at Paris 1 in 2011.
Sarah H. Cleveland is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-director of its Human Rights Institute. Her teaching and research cover international law, human rights, transitional justice and the constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations. As an Alliance visiting professor at Sciences Po, she proposed courses in these fields, including one on the law and practice of the UN human rights mechanisms, and pursued research on comparative approaches to counterterrorism and human rights at the intersection of human rights law and the law of armed conflict.
Rodolfo de la Garza is a professor of political science at Columbia University. He spent a month as an Alliance visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in April-May 2016, where he presented his research in a seminar.
Robert E. Harrist Jr. is a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University. His book The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China received the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies (2010). He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge (2006-07) and has received Columbia's Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award and an award for distinguished service to the Core Curriculum. He was an Alliance one-month visiting professor at Paris 1 in 2011.
Richard Peña is Professor of Professional Practice in Film at Columbia University and former program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. As an Alliance visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he taught a 14-session course on the American avant-garde in film, from its beginnings through Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, structural and feminist film, the diary film, punk cinema and sensory ethnography; he also proposed a course on Latin American cinema.
Richard Peña is Professor of Professional Practice in Film at Columbia University and former program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. As an Alliance visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he taught a 14-session course on the American avant-garde in film, from its beginnings through Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, structural and feminist film, the diary film, punk cinema and sensory ethnography; he also proposed a course on Latin American cinema.
Richard Briffault is a professor at Columbia Law School specializing in state and local government law and campaign finance. He is co-author of the casebook State and Local Government Law and of Dollars and Democracy: A Blueprint for Campaign Finance Reform. He has advised numerous New York City and State commissions on charter revision, districting and constitutional revision, and served as Assistant Counsel to New York Governor Hugh L. Carey. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Columbia. He was an Alliance one-month visiting professor at Paris 1 in 2012.
Richard Balme is a professor of political science at Sciences Po, affiliated with the Centre for European Studies, who teaches and researches comparative politics, public policy and international relations. He was scientific advisor of the Master in International Public Management at PSIA and director of the executive master "Potentiel Afrique," and was a full-time visiting professor at Tsinghua University (2008-2012). His research addresses EU-China relations, Chinese politics and governance, China's environment and climate policy, and comparative environmental governance. His Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia took place in 2016-17.
Professor Mukherjee received her B.S. from Presidency College, University of Calcutta and her M.A., MPhil, and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. In addition to being a professor, she served as the previous chair of physics and astronomy at Barnard College
Reshmi Mukherjee is a professor of physics at Barnard College, Columbia University, specializing in high-energy astrophysics: the study of Galactic and extragalactic gamma-ray sources using ground-based atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes and satellite experiments such as NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Since her first Alliance visiting professorship in 2014, she has collaborated with Deirdre Horan's high-energy astrophysics group at the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet (École polytechnique), producing joint publications, PhD projects and a doctoral mobility exchange; her 2024 visit built on this collaboration.
Renaud Le Goix is a geographer at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he teaches geography, urban studies and spatial analysis and has served as Vice President for Research. His doctoral research on gated communities in the United States demonstrated their impact on segregation patterns using GIS-based spatial analysis, and he has extended his work to other forms of private urban governance, such as Business Improvement Districts and airport cities. He has been a Fulbright Fellow (UCLA and CUNY) and a Tocqueville Fellow of the French-American Foundation (USC and UCLA).
Régine Le Jan is a professor of medieval history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. With Adam J. Kosto of Columbia, she led the Alliance project "Competition in Medieval Europe (c. 500-c. 1300)," which established competition as a new thematic field in early and high medieval history, moving beyond the study of dispute settlement, through workshops in New York and Paris that linked the medieval history programs and younger researchers of both universities.
Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac is a CNRS research scientist at École polytechnique and a member of the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet since 2000. His research focuses on particle and heavy-ion physics, and he is the author of numerous publications within the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) collaboration at CERN and the PHENIX heavy-ion experiment. He teaches at École Centrale Paris and École polytechnique, and received his PhD from the University of Paris VI in 2000.
Qiang Du is the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, where he has chaired the Applied Mathematics Program and co-chaired the Center for Foundations of Data Science. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University and was previously Verne M. Willaman Professor of Mathematics at Penn State. He is a Fellow of AAAS and SIAM, and his honors include the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize and the Feng Kang Prize in Scientific Computing.
Qiang Du is the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, where he has chaired the Applied Mathematics Program and co-chaired the Center for Foundations of Data Science. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University and was previously Verne M. Willaman Professor of Mathematics at Penn State. He is a Fellow of AAAS and SIAM, and his honors include the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize and the Feng Kang Prize in Scientific Computing.
Pierre-André Chiappori is the E. Rowan and Barbara Steinschneider Professor of Economics at Columbia University. A former student of the École normale supérieure, he holds the agrégation in mathematics and a doctorate in economics from the University of Paris 1. Before joining Columbia in 2005, he was a professor at the University of Chicago and, in France, a CNRS senior researcher, professor at ENSAE and maître de conférences at École polytechnique and EHESS.
Peter L. Strauss is a professor at Columbia Law School specializing in administrative law. As an Alliance visiting professor with the Chair of the Americas at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and IRJS, connected with the Sorbonne's Master in Digital Law, he studied French governmental uses of computer technology in interactions with the public, and lectured on how American government uses technology, including data disclosure as an alternative to direct regulation, open-government initiatives and public data sets such as Data.gov.
Pauline Nadrigny is an Associate Professor (Maîtresse de conférences HDR) of Philosophy at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she is affiliated with the Institut des Sciences Juridique et Philosophique de la Sorbonne (UMR 8103 ISJPS) and the Centre de Philosophie Contemporaine. Her research sits at the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy of art, and sound studies, with a growing focus on environmental aesthetics and philosophical realism.
Education and Early Career
Nadrigny's academic training is among the most distinguished possible in the French system. She ranked first nationally in the Agrégation in Philosophy in 2008 — a highly competitive national teaching examination — and holds a Master's degree from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) in Philosophy (2009), having also completed a Master's summa cum laude at Paris 1. She was awarded her PhD in Philosophy from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2014, with a dissertation titled "The Concept of Sound Object," supervised by A. Charrak. In 2024, she reached another milestone with her Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR), titled "The Sound Track: Aesthetics, Realism, and Environment," supervised by Jocelyn Benoist, with an examining committee that included scholars from NYU, Brown University, and EHESS.
Academic Career
Nadrigny has held her position as Associate Professor at Paris 1 since 2016. She previously taught as a lecturer at Sorbonne University (2015–2016) and held a certified high school teaching position in the Lille Academy (2014–2016), including in a Priority Education Network (REP+) school. She was a CNRS Research Fellow in 2019–2020, working on the program "Normativity of Aesthetic Experience" (NormExEsth).
Research
Nadrigny's scholarship is rooted in the philosophy of sound and music, and has expanded into environmental aesthetics and philosophical realism. She has authored three solo monographs: Sonder le monde, Arts sonores, Réalisme et Environnement (MF, 2025), Le voile de Pythagore : du son à l'objet (Classiques Garnier, 2021), and Musique et philosophie au XXe siècle, Entendre et faire entendre (Classiques Garnier, 2015). She also co-authored The Most Beautiful Ugly Sound in the World: à l'écoute de la noise with Catherine Guesde (Éditions MF, 2018), with support from the Centre National du Livre.
Her international profile is strong. She was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University's Philosophy Department in Spring 2020, invited by Lydia Goehr. She is a member of the International Research Project "Realism as a Philosophical Response to the Challenges of our Time," a collaboration between Paris 1, Bonn University, and Turin University, where she heads the Aesthetics program. She is also co-director of MIACE (Measuring the Impact of Art on Environmental Awareness), a project in partnership with the Paris School of Economics.
Recognition
In 2024, Nadrigny was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal, one of France's most prestigious recognitions for early-to-mid career researchers. She has received multiple research grants from Paris 1 and the Sorb'Rising program, and has served as an examiner for the ERC Starting Grant and on HCERES evaluation committees.
Editorial and Scientific Service
Nadrigny is co-director of Enceladus Press (distributed by The MIT Press), co-director of the book series "Research in Contemporary Aesthetics" at Vrin, and a member of the editorial board of the Nouvelle Revue d'Esthétique. She is Deputy Director of the Experience & Connaissance research group at ISJPS and a member of the CNU Section 17 (the national body governing philosophy academic appointments in France).
Musical Practice and Public Engagement
Beyond her scholarly work, Nadrigny has a notable creative practice. She performs and records under the name Lodz, with releases on the Tuskuboshi and Wild Silence labels, and has appeared at festivals including Villette Sonique and Les Femmes s'en Mêlent. She is a permanent member of the "Experimental Music" committee for the Prix de l'Académie Charles Cros, and has given a Master Class with Peter Cusack at the Jean Rouch Festival. She is a regular presence in French public intellectual life, appearing on France Culture, France Musique, and Métaclassique, and in televised interviews on Arte, including the program PhantasIA (2024).
Pablo Piccato is a professor of Latin American history at Columbia University. With Nara Milanich and Pablo Pinto, he coordinated the Alliance project "Contemporary Latin America: New Approaches and Research Agendas," a graduate seminar taught by visiting Columbia faculty at Sciences Po in fall 2010, designed to build long-term exchanges between Latin Americanists at both institutions and to lay the groundwork for a joint MA in Latin American Studies.
Olivier Nay is Professor of Political Science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a member of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP). His fields are development studies, international public affairs, global governance and international organizations, with recent work on institutional change, public administration reform, knowledge production and the transnational circulation of global norms. A first Alliance visiting professorship at SIPA in 2017 allowed him to conduct fieldwork at the United Nations Secretariat and the World Bank; he returned to Columbia as a visiting professor in 2023-24.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Columbia University. My research areas are macroeconomics and finance.
Research
The Crowding Out Effect of Local Government Debt: Micro- and Macro-Estimates
Conditionally accepted, American Economic Review
How Steep is the Phillips Curve in Developing Economies? A Sufficient Statistics Approach and Estimates for India
with Juan Herreño (UCSD) and Malte Thie (Paris Dauphine)
Growth, Firm Scale, and the Energy Intensity of Production
with Kathryn McDonald (Columbia) and Conor Walsh (Columbia)
When Private Firms Provide Public Goods: The Allocation of CSR Spending
with Kim Fe Cramer (LSE) and Lucie Gadenne (Queen Mary University London)
Mediating Financial Intermediation
with Aymeric Bellon (UNC Chapel Hill) and Louis-Marie Harpedanne (Banque de France)
Robust Statistics for Monetary Non-Neutrality in Menu Cost Economies
[Draft available soon]
with Beatrice Allamand-Turner (UCSD) and Juan Herreño (UCSD)
Teaching
Undergraduate ECON GU4720: Empirical Macroeconomics & Finance.
Undergraduate ECON GU4913: Financial Policy and Regulation: Fostering Growth and Macroeconomic Stability.
PhD 2nd year ECON GR6226: Applied Macroeconomics & Finance
Nicolas Delalande is an Associate Professor at the Centre for History at Sciences Po, where he researches and teaches the history of capitalism, political history and transnational history. He co-edited, with Nicolas Barreyre, A World of Public Debts: A Political History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), the result of an international research project on the global history of public debt developed in dialogue with Columbia's Adam Tooze. He has advised several Columbia PhD students researching in Paris, and spent spring 2022 as an Alliance visiting professor in Columbia's History Department.
Nadia Urbinati is the Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. With Antoine Vauchez and Magali Bessone of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, she co-led the Alliance project "Mediterranean Transatlantic Europe," an interdisciplinary study of the European political space and its Mediterranean and Atlantic dimensions with respect to the refugee crisis, freedom of movement, migration policy and borders, bringing together a transatlantic consortium of scholars and PhD students.
Michalis Vazirgiannis is a professor at École polytechnique, where he heads the Data Science and Mining (DaSciM) team at LIX, working on data science and AI. As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia's Data Science Institute, he proposed a Master's-level course on "Advanced Machine Learning for Text and Graphs," covering NLP, graph-of-words methods, word and document embeddings and deep learning architectures, based on the course he teaches in the Master MVA.
Michalis Vazirgiannis is a professor at École polytechnique, where he heads the Data Science and Mining (DaSciM) team at LIX, working on data science and AI. As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia's Data Science Institute, he proposed a Master's-level course on "Advanced Machine Learning for Text and Graphs," covering NLP, graph-of-words methods, word and document embeddings and deep learning architectures, based on the course he teaches in the Master MVA.
Research Interest
Micah Goldblum is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. His research focuses on deep learning, especially on building safe AI systems and also using mathematical tools to understand how and why deep learning works. Micah’s research portfolio includes award winning work in Bayesian inference, generalization theory, algorithmic reasoning, and AI security, privacy, and fairness. Micah’s work appears at venues like NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and CVPR. In 2022, he received the ICML Outstanding Paper Award. Before his current position, Micah was a postdoctoral research fellow at New York University with Yann LeCun and Andrew Gordon Wilson before which he received a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Maryland under Tom Goldstein and Wojciech Czaja.
For more information on Dr. Goldblum's work and contributions to the field, please visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, and follow him on Twitter.
Matthias Thiemann is a sociologist, with close affinities to political economy. On the one hand, he is analyzing the attempts of financial regulators in Europe and the US to control the risk taking behavior of agents in the financial industry, an attempt complicated by the fact that these agentsgain from evading such control. On the other hand, Matthias Thiemann is investigating post-crisis regulatory changes in the US asking why certain ideas that gained prominence post-crisis are translated into policy tools, while others are eschewed by policy makers. Methodologically, he is drawing on expert interviews and document analysis, but also citation network analysis and topic modeling.
CURRENT PROJECTS
KNOWLEGPO - Central banking in hard times: Knowledge, legitimacy, and politics (2023-2026)
EvalEU 2 - Evaluating Blended Finance in the EU (2023-2025)
Latest news
Interview - Pursuing financial stability after the crisis: the unhappy consciousness of central bankers
Video - The European Investor State: when public actors act like investors (with Ulrike Lepont)
Analysis - The EU’s planned reconstruction efforts of Ukraine: A game changer?
Video - Taming the real estate boom in the EU?
To know more
Matthias Preindl is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Electrification. His Alliance short-term visiting professorship at École polytechnique (2025-26) aimed to build research collaboration and partnerships in energy efficiency, forecasting of renewable generation and flexible loads, and resilient smart grids, pursuing joint research on smart inverters and battery energy storage with colleagues including Claudia D'Ambrosio and Philippe Drobinski.
Matthew McKelway is a professor of Japanese art history at Columbia University. Having taught Art Humanities at Reid Hall, Columbia's Global Center in Paris, he proposed as an Alliance visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (spring 2019) a graduate seminar centered on the direct study of Japanese paintings in Paris collections such as the Musée Guimet and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, examining materials, techniques and insights from recent conservation alongside primary documents and current research.
My original background is in Computational Mechanics and Computational Materials Science. The ultimate aspiration of my current research is to use the fundamental laws of physics and the power of modern computing and imaging facilities to improve cardiology and pulmonology. Generally speaking, my work belongs to the general field of biomedical engineering science, whose objectives are (i) to better understand the phenomenon of life in health and disease, and (ii) to develop and analyze novel concepts and methods for biomedical engineering, i.e., which will be the foundation of objective and quantitative tools for medicine, i.e., for the diagnosis and treatment of patients. More precisely, my research focuses on the development of (i) models of the mechanics of living tissues and organs (mostly the heart and the lungs), (ii) methods and tools for the simulation of such models (which can be used as a prediction tool, i.e., prognosis, but also to investigate competing hypothesis), and (iii) methods and tools for the estimation of model parameters based on clinical data (which can be used to estimate quantities that cannot be measured in vivo, i.e., augmented diagnosis, and to build personalized models, a.k.a. digital twins, that can be used to design patient-specific therapies, i.e., optimized treatment).
Mechanics Department & Solid Mechanics Laboratory, École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, FranceMark Lilla is a Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. French politics, history and culture have been central to his intellectual life since the late 1980s, when he studied at the École des hautes études while completing his doctorate at Harvard. He co-founded the New French Thought series at Princeton University Press and was named to the Ordre des Palmes académiques in 1995. Several of his books have appeared in French, including Le Dieu mort-né and La Gauche identitaire. As an Alliance visiting professor, he taught a graduate course in political theory at Sciences Po.
Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle is a political scientist (maître de conférences) at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and CEMAf, and co-editor of the journal Politique africaine. Her research focuses on Cameroon and on collective mobilization and protest in Africa.
María Victoria Murillo is a professor of political science and international affairs at Columbia University, with a PhD from Harvard University. As an Alliance short-term visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (April 2016), she taught on citizenship and democracy in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries, led a doctoral seminar on the history of the state in Latin America, and gave a public lecture on political economy and public policy in Latin America, strengthening ties between Latin Americanist historians and political scientists at Paris 1 and Columbia.
Maria Stavrinaki is an art historian at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and scientific director of the journal Critique d'art. Her book Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time, completed during a 2018 fellowship at Columbia's Italian Academy, was published in English by Zone Books in 2022. She has longstanding ties with Columbia colleagues in art history, and her Alliance visiting professorship supported her current research on post-WWII American art.
Marcel Nutz is a professor of statistics and mathematics at Columbia University, working in mathematical finance and stochastic analysis. Trained at ETH Zurich, he worked closely early in his career with Nizar Touzi of École polytechnique's Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées (CMAP) and with Bruno Bouchard. His Alliance visiting professorship took him to École polytechnique's Department of Applied Mathematics.
Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies at Columbia University. With Laurent Jaffro of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he co-leads the African Humanities Project, a collaboration between Columbia, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and Paris 1 that reinterprets the humanities through an African lens and develops an African humanities curriculum through a series of workshops.
Mae Ngai is a professor of history at Columbia University specializing in immigration, citizenship and transnational history. As an Alliance short-term visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in spring 2015, she taught the course "Histories of transnational migration and citizenship in comparative perspective," examining new methodologies that de-center the nation-state, with case studies from Europe, the United States and Asia.
LynNell Hancock is a professor of journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she has taught since 1996 and directed the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship. Her specialty is covering education in the broad context of family policy, including juvenile justice, child protection and social welfare, with a focus on racial and social inequality in public education. Before joining Columbia she reported on education for the Village Voice, the New York Daily News and Newsweek. Her Alliance visiting professorship at Paris 1's CESSP supported research on immigrant schools and populations in the banlieues of Paris.
Lucas Gerin is a mathematician at École polytechnique working in combinatorial probability and its applications to statistical mechanics. His research describes the limit behavior of random combinatorial objects such as permutations, graphs and paths, with a focus on new limiting objects and universality phenomena, including the Brownian separable permuton (Annals of Probability, 2018) and exactly solvable models in last-passage percolation. His Alliance visit to Columbia's Mathematics Department was hosted by Professor Ivan Corwin.
Louis Chauvel is a sociologist (professor at Sciences Po at the time of his visit) whose research focuses on social inequalities, birth-cohort divides and welfare state transformations in Europe. He shows that France and other Southern European welfare regimes over-protect insiders at the expense of young adults, immigrants and women, drawing on three decades of comparative data from twelve countries. His Alliance year at Columbia (2011-12) supported a book project on European welfare states, cohort inequalities and the generational challenge.
Lorenzo M. Polvani is a professor at Columbia University specializing in atmospheric and climate science, with a focus on the stratosphere and middle atmosphere. He has chaired the American Meteorological Society's Committee on the Middle Atmosphere, co-chaired the Whole Atmosphere Working Group of the Community Earth System Model, and co-authored the chapter on global ozone in the UNEP/WMO Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion (2006). His Alliance visiting professorship was at École polytechnique (2014-15).
Liliana Borcea is the George P. Livanos Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia Engineering.
Her research interests are in applied mathematics, with particular interests in wave propagation in random media with applications to wave-based imaging and free space optical communications; inverse problems for hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic partial differential equations; and data-driven reduced order modeling and applications to inverse problems.
Professor Borcea earned her undergraduate degree in Applied Physics from the University of Bucharest in Romania and her PhD in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics (SCCM) from Stanford University. Following a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Caltech, she joined the faculty in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in 1996 and was named the Noah Harding Professor in 2007. She then joined the Mathematics faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she has been the Peter Field Collegiate Professor of Mathematics since 2013.
Professor Borcea was recognized as the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer for 2017, selected "for her distinguished scientific contributions to the mathematical and numerical analysis of wave propagation in random media, array imaging in complex environments, and inverse problems in high-contrast electrical impedance tomography, as well as model reduction techniques for parabolic and hyperbolic partial differential equations." She is a member of the 2018 class of SIAM Fellows and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Research Interests
Wave propagation in random media with applications to wave based imaging and free space optical communications; Inverse problems for hyperbolic, elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations; , Data driven reduced order modeling and applications to inverse problems; Scientific computing
Leo Liberti is a CNRS research director at LIX, École polytechnique, working in mathematical optimization. His Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia's Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, in a reciprocal exchange with Daniel Bienstock, focused on optimization methods for Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) problems and secure power grid operation.
Lawrence D. Brown is a professor of health policy at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and a member of the Institute of Medicine. He previously taught government at Harvard University and was a research associate in the Governmental Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.
Laurent Jaffro is a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. With Mamadou Diouf and Jinny Prais of Columbia and Ali Benmakhlouf, he co-leads the African Humanities Project, a collaboration between Columbia, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and Paris 1 that reinterprets the humanities through an African lens and, through a series of workshops, develops an African humanities curriculum engaging with the historical, philosophical and cultural dimensions of African intellectual traditions.
Laurence Tubiana is the founder of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) in Paris and a professor at Sciences Po, where she directed the Sustainable Development Center. She has long participated in international climate negotiations, served as senior environmental advisor to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (1997-2002) and set up the Directorate for Global Public Goods at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2009-2010). She has sat on the scientific boards of CIRAD, the India Council for Sustainable Development and the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, and founded the journal Le Courrier de la Planète.
Kenneth D. Crews is a copyright scholar who directed Columbia University's Copyright Advisory Office. As an Alliance one-month visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in April 2011, he met with partners including the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA) on copyright issues raised by art and photographic images of art.
Julie Saada is Professor of Philosophy at Sciences Po Law School. She previously taught at Artois University, the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris-Sorbonne and Lille, and was a CNRS researcher. She holds a PhD and a habilitation from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the agrégation in philosophy. Her expertise covers the history of political and legal philosophy, the philosophy of international law, international justice (war, post-war, transitional and international criminal justice), human rights, critical legal movements and law and literature.
Josselin Garnier has been a professor in applied mathematics since 2001, first in Toulouse, France then in Paris at the University Paris Diderot and at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and at the Ecole Polytechnique since 2016. His research interests concern various aspects of applied probability and stochastic modeling, including wave propagation in random media, imaging for waves in complex media, and uncertainty quantification. Among Garnier's awards are the Felix Klein Prize and Blaise Pascal Prize. Garnier is a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the French Academy of Sciences.
John Mutter is a professor in Columbia's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the School of International and Public Affairs. With economist Eric Strobl of École polytechnique, he led the Alliance project "Sustainable Economic Development and Natural Disaster Shocks," combining natural-science and economic data, including satellite-derived nightlights as a proxy for development, to study the short- and long-run economic effects of earthquakes, and co-taught a graduate course on disasters and development in Paris and New York.
John Morrison is a philosopher at Columbia University. With Laurent Jaffro of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he developed an Alliance project on moral realism and human agency, asking whether values are properties of the world or projections of our desires and sentiments, and how the answer bears on goal-directed agency and its responsiveness to value.
John Huber is a professor of political science at Columbia University specializing in comparative politics, including the differences between democracies and autocracies, democratic institutions and political representation. His Alliance visiting professorship took place in 2012-13.
Johanna Siméant is a political scientist at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne specializing in mobilization and protest, with a focus on Mali. As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia in 2012-13, she taught a course on "Contentious Malians: violence, dissent and mobilization in contemporary Mali" and took part in a panel on Mali with Columbia's Institute of African Studies.
Jérôme Sgard is a professor at Sciences Po whose research and teaching span economic history and political economy, centered on the history of the governance of international and national markets, from the jurisdiction of the medieval Champagne fairs to early modern European bankruptcy laws. His main current project is a history of international commercial arbitration from the 1880s to the 1980s. He spent a semester at Columbia as an Alliance visiting professor in 2015-16.
Jeremy Perelman is a tenured Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Programs at Sciences Po Law School, and a former Lecturer in Law at Columbia (2009-11). He has received Alliance Joint Faculty Project grants in 2011 and 2016, including work with Columbia's Human Rights Institute on critical human rights advocacy. His Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia Law School (2020-21) supported research on how human rights discourse is deployed in environmental and climate change law and justice frameworks.
Jeffrey R. Lax is a professor of political science at Columbia University whose primary field is judicial politics and law. As an Alliance short-term visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he proposed a course evaluating law and courts as political institutions and judges as political actors, using the U.S. federal courts as a case study in comparison with other legal systems, and covering judicial review, judicial power and Supreme Court decision-making.
Jean-Pierre Filiu is a professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po and a historian of contemporary Islam and the Arab world. His books include Les Neuf vies d'Al-Qaida (Fayard, 2009), and he has written on jihadist networks, French policy in the Middle East and Palestinian history in journals including the Middle East Journal and the Journal of Palestine Studies. He was an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia in 2010-11.
Jean-Philippe Garric is a professor of the history of architecture at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia (spring 2019), hosted by Professor Barry Bergdoll, he proposed two graduate courses: "Paris and Europe 1770-1830: Revolutions in architectural theory and practice," and a course on the history of the architectural book and architectural theory in Italy and France from the 15th to the 20th century.
Jane C. Ginsburg is a professor at Columbia Law School specializing in intellectual property. With Célia Zolynski of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, she led the Alliance joint project "Comparative Aspects of Online Platforms Regulation (US/EU)," which examines the European approach to regulating online platforms (including the DSA and DMA) from a U.S. perspective, potential conflicts between European and U.S. standards, and possible convergence on a legal framework for the attention economy, through symposia at Paris 1 and Columbia in 2024.
Jack Willis is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Columbia University, specializing in development economics. He moved to economics from mathematics through a Master's at the Paris School of Economics (2007-09) and was a visiting researcher at PSE in 2017. His Alliance visiting professorship at Sciences Po (2023-24) aimed to build ties with faculty and graduate students there and to develop a research presence in francophone West Africa.
Isabela Mares is a professor of political science at Columbia University who teaches comparative politics, social policy and political economy. As an Alliance visiting professor at Sciences Po (2014-15), she taught the course "Social Policies around the World," building on collaborations with Patrick Le Galès, with whom she co-organized the conference "States in Crisis."
Ioannis Mylonopoulos is a professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University specializing in ancient Greek and Roman art, religion and ritual. Before Columbia, he taught at the University of Heidelberg and served on the executive committee of its Collaborative Research Centre "Ritual Dynamics." His dissertation won the Margarete Häcker Award for the best dissertation in Classics in German, and he received Columbia's Faculty Mentorship Award in 2011. He was an Alliance one-month visiting professor at Paris 1 in 2012.
Professor Ioannis Kymissis joined the Columbia University Electrical Engineering faculty in 2006. He teaches courses in solid state devices and display technology. He obtained his SB, MEng and PhD degrees from MIT, and also participated in a cooperative program through which he completed his M.Eng. thesis at IBM Research. He also held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT and worked as a consulting engineer at QDVision before joining Columbia.
Prof. Kymissis's research focuses on the fabrication, characterization, and applications of thin film electronics, with a particular focus in the applications of organic semiconductors, thin film piezoelectric, and recrystallized silicon devices. In addition to his teaching and research work, he is also active in the Society for Information Display and IEEE EDS.
Holger A. Klein is Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where he has served as department chair and Director of Graduate Studies and chaired the Faculty Steering Committee for the Columbia Global Center in Istanbul. A specialist in medieval and Byzantine art, he was previously the Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He holds a Dr. phil. from the University of Bonn and an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art. His Alliance visiting professorship was at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2015-16).
Henri Bergeron is a CNRS research professor at Sciences Po (Centre de sociologie des organisations) working on health policy. With Constance A. Nathanson of Columbia, he led the Alliance project "Crisis in Context: Sagas of HIV Blood Contamination in the US and France," which asks why HIV contamination of the blood supply became a major political crisis in France but not in the United States, focusing on the cultural and institutional dimensions of the two blood systems.
Hélène Périvier is an economist at OFCE-Sciences Po, where she directs PRESAGE, the Sciences Po gender studies program, and coordinates the EU-funded EGERA project (Effective Gender Equality in Research and the Academia). Her Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (fall 2017) aimed to build long-term links between PRESAGE and SIPA's Gender and Public Policy specialization, share experience on gender equality policies in academia, and develop research collaborations on gender and public policy.
George A. Bermann is a professor at Columbia Law School specializing in international arbitration and European Union law. With colleagues at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he led an Alliance project on the impact of extraterritorial legislation on international business transactions, especially in U.S.-EU relations, bringing together academics, business leaders and public officials in seminars in New York and Paris, with a view to publishing findings and proposals to reduce the associated risks.
Geneviève Fraisse is a preeminent French feminist philosopher and Research Director at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris. She is the author of numerous publications, notably La Fabrique du féminisme (2012), À côté du genre: sexe et philosophie de l'égalité (2010) and Du Consentement (2007).
Fredrick C. Harris is a professor of political science at Columbia University. As an Alliance short-term visiting professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he taught the mini-course "The Politics of Minority Protest in the United States," covering racial and ethnic identity and political attitudes, minority representation, the party system, minority activism and the role of immigration status, with a foundation in Black politics and extensions to Latino and Asian-American politics.
Frank R. Lichtenberg is a professor at Columbia Business School whose research examines the impact of technological innovation, especially pharmaceutical innovation, on longevity and economic growth. Work associated with his Alliance visiting professorship (2011) investigated the contribution of newer prescription drugs and chemotherapy treatments to recent increases in life expectancy and declines in mortality in Germany and France.
Frank A. Guridy is a historian at Columbia University. As an Alliance visiting professor in France in spring 2026, he proposed the course "Sport and Society in France and Beyond," which explores the history of sport and society in France, the country's role in staging mega sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup, and the impact of the sport industry in the wake of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Florence Haegel is a Full Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po and, since 2016, Head of the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE). She is a member of the MaxPo Joint Council, sits on the board of the French Political Science Association (AFSP) and the editorial board of the Revue française de science politique, and represents France on the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association.
Fabien Théofilakis is a historian at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne specializing in 19th- and 20th-century German history, the social and cultural history of conflicts and post-war periods in Europe, and the history of the Holocaust. As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia in 2024, he taught a course on "trials for history," examining how the Second World War and Nazi crimes have been judged from the Nuremberg tribunal to national trials in the 21st century, and shared his research on the Eichmann trial.
Eugene Wu is a computer scientist at Columbia University working at the intersection of data management, systems and artificial intelligence. His Alliance short-term visiting professorship at École polytechnique (August 2025) aimed to establish a research collaboration with its Computer Science Department and included a lecture on AI agent-based automation, a research area with the potential to transform production and reshape the business and societal landscape.
Étienne Ollion is a professor of Sociology at the École Polytechnique and a researcher at CNRS. Specializing in politics, his works investigate the texture of power in modern societies. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods alike and is an enthusiastic promoter of computational social sciences.
Étienne Jollet is Professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is particularly interested in the relationships between art and knowledge (for example, gravity in painting), art and power (royal portraits and royal monuments), and the historiography of the discipline.
Eric Strobl is an economist at École polytechnique. With John Mutter of Columbia, he led the Alliance project "Sustainable Economic Development and Natural Disaster Shocks," which studies the short- and long-run economic consequences of earthquakes using natural-science data and satellite-derived nightlights, and co-taught a graduate course on disasters and development in Paris and New York.
Eric Godelier is a professor at École polytechnique working on the conception and diffusion of managerial models and tools. A strong advocate of comparative and interdisciplinary approaches that bring anthropology, sociology and history into management science, he studies the links between French managerial and technical elites and national education systems, and their impact on state-business relations. As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia (fall 2015), he taught American students the history of French management and capitalism in comparative perspective.
Emanuele Ferragina is a sociologist at Sciences Po whose work focuses on comparative social policy, family policy and research methods. As an Alliance visiting professor at the Columbia School of Social Work (January-June 2019), he taught a course on Comparative Social Policy, building on the school's strengths in this area.
Elise Huillery is an economist at Sciences Po (Assistant Professor at the time of her visit). As an Alliance visiting professor hosted by Columbia's Department of Economics in spring 2013, she taught a course in development economics to 80 undergraduate and graduate students, took part in the department's development economics seminars and presented her research at two Columbia seminars.
Eleonora Bottini is a public law scholar. Her Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia (2017-18) centered on the research project "Constitutional interpretation and legal comparison: controversies and strategies," which examines comparative law as a method of constitutional interpretation used by scholars and judges, and how comparative constitutional law has become a sub-field with its own paradigms and debates.
Eduardo Perez is an economist at École polytechnique (Assistant Professor at the time of his visit). As an Alliance visiting professor, he spent the spring 2013 semester in Columbia's Department of Economics, discussing his research with faculty, developing new research directions and taking part in the department's academic life.
Édouard Challe is an economist at École polytechnique working in macroeconomics and finance. For his Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia, he proposed a graduate course on financial crises covering liquidity crises in financial institutions and markets, and asset bubbles and crashes.
Dominique Poulot is a Professor of Art History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has worked extensively with art manuals, literary criticism, travel guides and visitors' memoirs of the long eighteenth century, and is the author of numerous books, including Une histoire des musées de France (2005) and Une histoire du patrimoine en Occident (2006). He created an MA program in Museum Studies at Paris 1 and has held fellowships including a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute, Junior and Senior Fellowships of the Institut Universitaire de France, and a Getty Scholar Fellowship.
Denis-Didier Rousseau is a paleoclimatologist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (École polytechnique, ENS, UPMC, CNRS). His research uses loess and other wind-blown (eolian) deposits as archives of past atmospheric circulation, to understand the highly variable, alternately dusty and non-dusty climate of the last glacial cycle and to test the ability of climate models to reproduce strong wind events. His Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia took place in 2013-14.
David Stark is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University. For more than thirty years his research has been in dialogue with French interlocutors, from Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski to Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and the Conventions School. As an Alliance visiting professor at Sciences Po in spring 2016, he taught a PhD seminar in economic sociology.
David Scott is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. As an Alliance visiting professor in Paris in 2012-13, he taught a nine-week seminar on Frantz Fanon to students from EHESS and Paris 1, reading Peau noire, masques blancs and Les damnés de la terre and examining how Fanon engaged with négritude, surrealism, existentialism, Marxism and psychoanalysis in thinking through racism and colonialism.
David Stark is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University. For more than thirty years his research has been in dialogue with French interlocutors, from Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski to Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and the Conventions School. As an Alliance visiting professor at Sciences Po in spring 2016, he taught a PhD seminar in economic sociology.
Daniel Bienstock is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. His Alliance visiting professorship at École polytechnique (CNRS LIX), in a reciprocal exchange with Leo Liberti, focused on Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) and related problems of secure power grid operation, including semidefinite programming relaxations and quadratically constrained quadratic programming. He also taught on integer and mixed-integer programming, power grid operations and high-performance optimization.
Craig Spencer, MD, MPH, is Director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine and Population and Family Health at Columbia. An emergency physician, he has worked extensively with Médecins Sans Frontières, including as an epidemiologist during the Ebola response in Guinea, a trauma and emergency physician in Burundi and Chad, and a doctor on Mediterranean search-and-rescue missions. He proposed an Alliance visiting professorship at Sciences Po (2018-19).
Claude Basdevant was a professor at École polytechnique and Head of its Department of Mechanics, whose Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique has a long history of scientific collaboration with Columbia University in climate studies.
Christophe Josserand is a physicist at École polytechnique whose research focuses on the dynamics of multiphase flows, including drop impact, solidification and fragmentation, as well as turbulence. His Alliance short-term visiting professorship at Columbia was developed with Professor Qiang Du of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, in a reciprocal exchange focused on the dynamics of interfaces and turbulence models, and included a series of lectures.
Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow at Sciences Po (CERI) specializing in South Asian politics. With Sudipta Kaviraj of Columbia, he co-led an Alliance project on Indian conservatism, which seeks to understand India's conservative tradition in its own terms, its core principles and internal diversity, and how it has shaped Indian politics, even as economic change, eroding caste hierarchies and religious reform transform Indian society.
Bruno Martinaud is a professor at École polytechnique, where he has led the Technology Venture Master's program, which combines advanced scientific training with education in entrepreneurship, innovation and management. With Yvan Bonnassieux, he proposed an exchange with Columbia allowing students to spend a semester in New York's entrepreneurial ecosystem, with a focus on sustainable development, energy, climate and smart cities.
Boris Altshuler is a Professor of Physics at Columbia University working on the theory of complex quantum systems, including disordered many-body systems, mesoscopic structures, ultracold quantum gases and physical realizations of quantum computers. With Basko and Aleiner, he showed in 2005 that the states of a many-body system can be localized in Hilbert space, establishing many-body localization (MBL) as a central concept in the field, with implications for the foundations of statistical physics. His Alliance visiting professorship was at École polytechnique (2015-16).
Bette Gordon is a filmmaker and professor in Columbia University's Film Program, and a pioneer of American independent film known for bold explorations of sexuality, violence and pornography. Her film Variety (1984) was invited to the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and festivals worldwide; Luminous Motion (2000) premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, and Handsome Harry (2009), starring Steve Buscemi, premiered in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival. She was an Alliance one-month visiting professor at Paris 1 in 2012.
Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University. During his Alliance visiting semester at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2017-18), he worked on completing two long-standing book projects, including a book for Princeton University Press based on his 2013 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, "Out of Site/In Plain View: A History of Exhibiting Architecture since 1750," drawing on French archives and collections and on the research of Dominique Poulot on the history of collections.
Ariel Colonomos is a CNRS research professor at Sciences Po (CERI) working in international relations, with a focus on the role of norms, ethics and ideas in international politics. His research covers the theory of international politics, the rules and ethics of war, including anticipatory action, and the role of predictive ideas in international decisions, such as anticipations of US decline and the role of rating agencies in international finance. As an Alliance visiting professor at Columbia, he taught on the role of norms in international politics, building on his SIPA course on ethical issues in international affairs.
Antoine Vauchez is a CNRS research director at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. With Nadia Urbinati (Columbia) and Magali Bessone (Paris 1), he co-led the Alliance project "Mediterranean Transatlantic Europe," which studies the European political space in its Mediterranean and Atlantic dimensions, in relation to the refugee crisis, freedom of movement, migration policy and the externalization of borders, through a transatlantic consortium and workshops at Columbia and Paris 1.
Antoine Guibal is Assistant Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Languages and Cultures at the École polytechnique in Paris, France. He completed his PhD at the University of Virginia in 2017, where he wrote his dissertation on Stendhal's lives of great men. His book Stendhal biographe was published by UGA Editions in 2020. His fields of research include French Romantic literature, biography, and autobiography. He is also very much interested in the American literature of the 1920s, particularly the works of expatriate writers living in Paris.
Andrew J. Millis is a professor of physics at Columbia University working at the intersection of theoretical physics and materials science. As Alliance Visiting Professor at École polytechnique in spring 2012, he began collaborations with Antoine Georges, Silke Biermann and Leonid Pourovskii on predictive theoretical tools for transition metal oxides with correlated electron properties such as high-temperature superconductivity and colossal magnetoresistance, which continued through an Alliance joint project.
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University and founding director of its Applied Statistics Center. He holds a PhD in statistics from Harvard University and degrees in mathematics and physics from MIT, and previously taught at UC Berkeley. He was the Alliance Visiting Professor at Sciences Po in 2009-10.
Aline Caillet is an art theorist at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. With Columbia's Jane Gaines, she co-led the Alliance research group "Art documentaire / Documentary Art: challenges to politics and aesthetics," which links Francophone and Anglo-American traditions in documentary theory and asks how new artistic methods disrupt our relation to reference, information and "truth." The project included workshops and symposia in New York and Paris towards the exhibition "Documentary Art & Activism Then and Now."
Alfred Galichon is an economist (then at École polytechnique's Department of Economics). With Bernard Salanié of Columbia, he led the Alliance project "Analyzing complementarities on matching markets," which develops econometric models of matching markets, such as the marriage market and the matching of employees to positions, that bridge the gap between general matching theory and models simple enough to be taken to the data.
Alexander Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he designed the politics curriculum of the school's interdisciplinary M.A. program. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, and a columnist for La Repubblica, he is the author of books including The Future of the Past (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).
Alessandra Casella is a Columbia University economist. She began an Alliance visiting professorship at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in January 2020, teaching in the Master II in Analyse et Politique Économique at the Paris School of Economics, until the pandemic cut her stay short. Her collaboration with Antonin Macé at PSE produced the paper "Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare?" (Annual Review of Economics). She returned in spring 2022 to complete interrupted projects with Francis Bloch, Jean-François Laslier and Olivier Compte at PSE.
Alessandra Casella is a Columbia University economist. She began an Alliance visiting professorship at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in January 2020, teaching in the Master II in Analyse et Politique Économique at the Paris School of Economics, until the pandemic cut her stay short. Her collaboration with Antonin Macé at PSE produced the paper "Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare?" (Annual Review of Economics). She returned in spring 2022 to complete interrupted projects with Francis Bloch, Jean-François Laslier and Olivier Compte at PSE.
Alessandra Casella is a Columbia University economist. She began an Alliance visiting professorship at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in January 2020, teaching in the Master II in Analyse et Politique Économique at the Paris School of Economics, until the pandemic cut her stay short. Her collaboration with Antonin Macé at PSE produced the paper "Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare?" (Annual Review of Economics). She returned in spring 2022 to complete interrupted projects with Francis Bloch, Jean-François Laslier and Olivier Compte at PSE.
Alain Duplouy is an archaeologist and historian of early Greece at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Art History and Archaeology. He helped build the close partnership between Paris 1 and Columbia's Department of Art History and Archaeology, including a dual MA and the project "Parallel Heritages," developed with Holger Klein and Francesco de Angelis, on the history of the Classical antiquities collections of Columbia and Paris 1.
Alain Dieckhoff is a CNRS research director at Sciences Po's Center for International Studies (CERI), specializing in nationalism, religion and politics. As Alliance Visiting Professor at Columbia in 2023-24, he taught a course in the Department of Political Science on the religionization of politics and worked with Nadia Urbinati, with whom he collaborated on the Alliance-funded project "Populism in America, Europe and the Middle East: ethical and religious dimensions."
Alain Dieckhoff is a CNRS research director at Sciences Po's Center for International Studies (CERI), specializing in nationalism, religion and politics. As Alliance Visiting Professor at Columbia in 2023-24, he taught a course in the Department of Political Science on the religionization of politics and worked with Nadia Urbinati, with whom he collaborated on the Alliance-funded project "Populism in America, Europe and the Middle East: ethical and religious dimensions."
Adrian Favell is a sociologist at Sciences Po's Centre for European Studies (CEE), with a background combining philosophy, geography and political science, and research interests in both contemporary Europe and Asia. His work spans comparative-historical, ethnographic and quantitative methods, with expertise in new migrations and mobilities in Europe and the effects of regional integration. He has lived and worked in several European countries and Japan and was previously a professor of sociology at UCLA. His Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia (2013-14) connected him with Sociology, the Committee on Global Thought and European studies.
Claudia D'Ambrosio is a faculty member at École polytechnique. Her Alliance visiting professorship at Columbia, paired with a reciprocal visit by Columbia's Sharon Di, aimed to launch joint research projects and to strengthen the BS/MS student exchange between the two institutions, including co-advising students interested in transportation, operations research and data science.