Executive Committee

Dr. Vanessa Scherrer is the Vice President for International Affairs of Sciences Po. As such, she heads the international strategy of Sciences Po, including the 470 academic partnerships of the institution, its dual degree programs and strategic alliances across continents, and the international outreach and attractiveness of Sciences Po for students, faculty, and talents worldwide.

Before this, Dr. Scherrer had been the Executive Director and founding Vice Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po (2010-2017). She joined the leadership of PSIA with Dean Ghassan Salamé in 2010, and later with Dean Enrico Letta. Her management responsibilities covered curriculum and faculty affairs; student affairs, admissions and career services; international partnerships; financial and development affairs; communications and external relations. Under her leadership, PSIA grew to become this world-class school of international affairs with more than 400 faculty members and a community of 1600 students, 70% of the international students coming from more than 100 countries. Sciences Po is ranked #4 in Politics and International Affairs in the world (QS rankings, 2018).

Before joining Sciences Po, Dr. Scherrer spent a decade at Columbia University (2001-2010), New York, where she was the Director of the Alliance Program at Columbia University and a visiting professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). The Alliance Program is a forward-looking and sustainable partnership between four world-leading universities across the Atlantic (Columbia University, the Ecole Polytechnique, Sciences Po and the Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne). An endowed program at Columbia University, the Alliance Program has remained a unique academic endeavor in the world of international education benefiting more than 300 students and 80 faculty members every year.

Dr. Scherrer is a member of the faculty of Sciences Po. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris, France. At Columbia University and now at Sciences Po, Dr. Scherrer has taught Research Design and Qualitative Methods, Public Opinion and European Politics, and American Government. She has also launched and taught an experimental transatlantic course on Global Leadership, in collaboration with the Dean of the Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech University.

Vanessa Scherrer has been keen to be committed to civic endeavors that proved to promote global dialogue in an entrepreneurial spirit. She serves as the Vice President of the Paris Peace Forum (France) and was a member of the founding executive committee. She served on the founding board and on the steering board of the Groupe d’Intérêt Public for France’s bid for the World Expo in 2025. She has been part of the flagship Young Leaders program of the French American Foundation since 2013, which she has been supporting as a member of their programs and events committee. She has also served on the editorial committee of the innovative Echappée Volée, TEDx Paris.

She lives in Paris with her husband and their three children.

Unchain my Art has the ambition to enhance art exhibitions globally. Nowadays, numerous art pieces are in the hands of private collectors all around the world, while more exhibitions encounter large-scale public success. The need to connect both is pressing and would benefit all, but as collectors want to stay anonymous, museums can hardly connect with them. To solve this problem and enable exchange in a trustworthy environment we imagined a collective blockchain-based platform that can certify ownership while ensuring anonymity. Our project will help museums in their mission and make culture accessible to all.

Thomas is a doctoral candidate in African history. His research focuses on histories of childhood, gender, health, and development in West Africa in the 20th century. His dissertation, titled « Burkinabè Humanitarianisms: Children, Mutual Aid, and Migration in and beyond Burkina Faso (1932-1990) » examines the multifaceted interventions that surveyed children’s lives in Burkina Faso (Upper-Volta before 1984) from the 1930s to the 1980s. These efforts played a critical role in defining communities’ interactions and interpretations of governmental practice in the late colonial and post-colonial periods. The project links a history of social work practice, an analysis of economic models that quantified households in the post-war period, and a social history of experiences of such interventions.

Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Thomas worked as a Peace Corps Fellow at University Neighborhood Housing Program, working on housing rights in New York. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin for two years, with a focus on health and education.

Thaís Tanure is a historian, PhD candidate (funded) at University Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne. Member of the Centre for Social History at Contemporary Worlds and of the Labex Dynamite (Center of Excellence for Territorial and Spatial Dynamics). She is preparing a thesis on the heritage of slavery in Nantes and Rio de Janeiro (1983– 2019). Her research focuses on the processes of memorialization of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery from a transatlantic perspective, as well as on the history of Afro-Atlantic cultures.

Sogol Edriss Abadi is a Ph.D. candidate in International and European Law at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and her dissertation is on “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iranian Nuclear Issue in the Light of International Law”. Her dissertation aims to analyze this complex agreement called JCPOA, which was endorsed by the Security Council, and to determine its legal nature, as well as its implementation, which has been called into question since May 8, 2018, following the Trump administration’s announcement to end the United States’ participation in the JCPOA.

She received her Bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of Science and Culture in Tehran (in Persian: Daneshgah Elm va Farhang). She then came to France in order to continue her studies in international law and obtained a Master’s degree in International Law and International Relations from the University of Jean-Moulin (Lyon 3). In addition to her academic activities, during which she was a teaching assistant and tutor-librarian at the Universities of Paris 1 and Paris 2, respectively, she completed a three-year internship at Shearman & Sterling LLP in Paris, where she was in charge of enriching the Doctrinal database.

Advisor to the Russian government in the early 2010s, and Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow, the largest economics university in the country, Sergei Guriev left Russia in 2013 after denouncing the political repression and authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin. Threatened by the Russian regime and exiled to Paris, he joined the Economics Department at Sciences Po, where he became Scientific Director of the Master’s and PhD programmes in 2019. Between 2016 and 2019, Professor Guriev was also Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). At the beginning of his career, his research work took him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton University. He has recently taken up a five-year appointment as Senior Member to the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Laureate of the Chair for Fundamental Research.

Sean Treacy is a Ph.D. student in Chemistry at Columbia University where he conducts research on the photocatalytic functionalization of C-H bonds in the Rovis Group. His research has focused the remote functionalization of aliphatic amines through nickel-photoredox catalysis and the intermolecular alkylation of feedstock alkanes with electron deficient olefins via copper catalysis. He received his BA from Princeton University in 2016 in Chemistry along with a certificate in Materials Science and Engineering.

Rosanne Craveia holds a Master’s Degree in International Law and International Organizations from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and a LLM in International Human Rights Law from Oxford Brookes University (UK).

She is now a Ph.D. candidate in International Law at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University where she conducts her research on extractive industries and human rights, under the supervision of Professors Laurence Dubin and Evelyne Lagrange. Her thesis focuses on issues of responsibility and is based on the in-depth study of rigorously selected real cases in which human rights violations are alleged.

Rosanne was also a teaching assistant at the Sorbonne Law School for three and a half years: she has taught Public International Law, International Economic Law, International Relations, Administrative Law and Fundamental Rights.

Robert is a PhD candidate in Development Economics at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne. He focuses in his research predominantly on climate risk and disaster adaptation in a development context. Hereby, instead of solely spotlighting the macro dimension of the international finance-climate nexus, he chiefly centers his research around local economic impacts of (climate) disasters in developing countries measured, amongst others, by high resolution satellite imagery. To improve his understanding of applied disaster models, he has spent part of his PhD as a Visiting Scientist at the United Nations University in the Institute of Environment and Human Security in Germany.

Before joining the PhD program in 2021, he obtained a MSc in Economics and a MPhil in Development Economics from Paris 1 after completion of his undergraduate studies in Germany.

Racha Radja is currently a Ph.D candidate in Private International Law at Sorbonne Law School, entering her third year, under the supervision of Professor Pascal de Vareilles-Sommières. Racha holds two master’s degrees, one in European Economic Law and one in Private International Law and International Commercial Law, both from Paris 1 University.

Racha's thesis challenges the dogma of the neutrality of Private International Law, which is very much rooted in the French doctrine, by focusing on the existence of policies underlying the connecting factors of choice of law rules and rules of jurisdiction. She has a strong interest in comparative law, she decided to include European Union Law and American Conflict of Laws in her thesis.

Alongside her Ph.D, Racha is a teaching assistant, She teaches Private International Law and Human rights. She is also the President of the Lex Association, an association of students and alumni of the master’s degree in Private International Law and International Commercial Law.

Pierre François is a sociologist and CNRS research director at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CSO). He served as director of Sciences Po’s department of sociology from 2014 to 2017. His research focuses on the dynamics of the worlds of art – particularly contemporary poetry – and on the sociology of businesses and their leaders. Pierre François teaches in Sciences Po’s masters program as well as the Collège universitaire (undergraduate level), where he teaches the introduction to sociology course. He was a professor of sociology at the École polytechnique between 2009 and 2017. Pierre François aims to enable Sciences Po’s Doctoral School to meet the twin challenges of research internationalization and of the growing scientific and methodological requirements it involves. 

Occitane Lacurie is a PhD student in arts and visual studies at the École des Arts de la Sorbonne (Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne) under the supervision of Olivier Schefer and Christa Blümlinger (Université Paris 8 – Vincennes-Saint-Denis). Her doctoral research aims to enlighten the regimes of visibility and the modes rationality generated by ghostly apparitions and their scientific study. From a history of spectral sciences and an anthropology of techniques aiming at observing or reproducing ghostly phenomena, her dissertation proposes an archaeology of audiovisual media drawing on these paradoxical rationalities and an investigation of the artistic forms derived from them that still haunt our visual culture. At Université Paris 1 and Université Paris 8, she works as a teaching assistant in film studies and in philosophy of art. Prior to her doctorate, she completed two Master’s degrees in film studies and in arts at the ENS de Lyon and the EHESS.

Occitane is also a film critique for the French cinema journal Débordements and the cultural podcast of the newspaper Mediapart. She programs Débordements’ film club in the Saint- André-des-Arts cinema in Paris.

Nitouche Anthoussi is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts and Art Sciences at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, under the supervision of Professor Jean-Marie Dallet. Her doctoral research is about the appropriation of space in asylums, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and the world of metaverse, from an artistic, philosophical, and anthropological approach.

At the Columbia University she will be working in residence at the Justice in Education Initiative under the supervision of Professor Neni Panourgiá (Academic Adviser at JIE Initiative). She will be developing a project on comparative carcerality between Ellis Island and Leros (Greece).

Nitouche having previously completed a Master 2 at the same university in Fine Arts and Contemporary Creation. She has also graduated from the School of Fine Arts of the University of Ioannina, Greece. From her great love mathematics, she finds herself in art. She is the first Erasmus international student to have been accepted by the Centre Culturel Georges Pompidou in Paris as a photographer for the main art collection and has participated in several artistic exhibitions in Athens, Paris, Milan, Ioannina and Corinth. In her spare time, Nitouche sails with the Paris 1 university team.

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Meryl Lavenant is a PhD candidate at the History department in Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne University in France. She is an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure, and studied Russian language at Inalco (Paris). She is passionate with foreign languages and masters French, English, Italian, Spanish and Russian.

Her research deals with the Russian southern expansion and the maritime aspects of the imperial project developed in the Black Sea region from 1774 to the late nineteenth century. Meryl proposes a work at the crossroads of imperial and maritime History, paying special attention to the importance of space in imperial dynamics and representations. She is particularly interested in reflecting on methodological challenges, in a context of difficult access to archives in Ukraine and Russia.

Apart from her research activity, Meryl teaches in the Sorbonne and would like to explore the various and innovative ways in which historical research can be publicized.

Each year, more than 1 million people in the world die because of counterfeit medicines.

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Using Blockchain technology, Meditect and pharmaceutical companies empower patients and health professionals and strengthen public health in developing regions.

The Meditect app is designed for pharmaceutical companies, pharmacists and patients and is currently deployed in West Africa. 

Maya Chehade is a French-Syrian second-year Ph.D. student at Sciences Po Paris. Maya has worked for several years in the private sector with Syrian refugees in the Middle East, before starting her doctoral research at Sciences Po on the topic of “the impact of the private sector on Syrian refugees in Jordan”. During the Alliance Doctoral Mobility, she will work with ASPIRE, a Columbia University Research Project on Syrian refugees that include researchers and partners at local universities, governmental agencies, NGOs, and the UN in Jordan. Her doctoral mobility at Columbia aims to capitalize on data collected by ASPIRE in 2016 and 2018 to help the progress of her dissertation in a context of difficulty of access to the fieldwork due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Matthew Easton is a PhD candidate in economics at Columbia University. His current research interests are primarily in the fields of urban and spatial economics. In particular, he is studying urban growth and decay in the U.S. and France, and also is working on understanding how networks of cities can grow and succeed in developed and developing countries. Prior to beginning graduate work at Columbia in 2019, he graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 2016 and then worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Mathilde De Sloovere is completing her fourth year in the PhD program at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, working under the supervision of Professor Loiseau.

Mathilde holds a Master’s degree in Employment and Labor Law from Paris I Panthéon-  Sorbonne University. She is also graduate in Work Psychology from Paris II Panthéon-Assas. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the question of sick leave through the following subject: « L’arrêt de  travail, symptôme d’un mal-être ou syndrome précontentieux» (i.e. in English : Does the use of  sick leave illustrate a malaise at work or an abusive behavior ?). She has a comparative approach.

In the meantime, Mathilde taught as a teaching fellow and worked as a lawyer for three years in a  law firm.

Mathilde  has  chosen  an  interdisciplinary  approach  that  establishes  a dialogue  between law, psychology, medical, and sociology.
 

On November 20, 2021, following the joint publication of the President of the Republic’s decree confirming Mathias Vicherat’s appointment as director of the IEP and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation’s order confirming his appointment as administrator of the National Foundation of Political Science, Mathias Vicherat took office on Monday, November 22, 2021

Mathias Vicherat, age 43, received two Master’s degrees from Sciences Po (Political Science and Public Management) and is an alumnus of the École nationale d’administration (Senghor’s class). After beginning his career as Chief of Staff for the Picardie Region’s Prefect from 2004 to 2006, then as Deputy Prefect in Bobigny from 2006 to 2008, he served as Head of the National Police’s Territorial Division from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, he joined the Paris Mayor’s Office as Deputy Manager and became Chief of Staff two years later. In this position, he was responsible for the city’s foreign policy, crisis management, and the management of the entirety of the community’s public policy, including university policy, throughout both Bertrand Delanoë and Anne Hidalgo’s terms and until the end of 2016. In 2016, Mathias Vicherat joined the SNCF as Chief Executive Officer in charge of business planning and communication, before becoming Danone’s General Secretary from 2019 to 2021.

Martina Olivero is currently a Ph.D. Candidate and ATER in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the Sorbonne School of Arts, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she is a member of the Institut Acte (Aesthetics and Critical Theories of Culture). She holds both BA and MA in Philosophy from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan), with a focus on Existentialism and Psychoanalysis. She then specializes in German Philosophy (XVIII-XX century) and Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Her doctoral dissertation questions, with a critical approach, the role of the medium from ancient to contemporary artistic practices and mass culture by dealing with the acknowledgment of original devices, narratives, and representations in a late aesthetics of tragedy.

Martin Barnay is a Ph.D. candidate and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation deals with loneliness and social isolation in old age. He uses large, multi-country data sets from the telecare industry to explore the social nature of loneliness.

Martin has MA degrees in Sociology and History, and a BA degree in History and Economics. Prior to joining Columbia, he worked as a researcher at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne in Paris, France

Martial Manet is a Ph.D. candidate in law at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne under the supervision of Professor Jean Matringe. He is a graduate in philosophy, political science and law from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Based mainly on the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, his research attempts to identify past and present legal figurations – understood as representations that make a concept legally perceptible and operational – of the notion of people, as given and constructed by drafters, interpreters, and all actors in African human rights law.

Martial has chosen an interdisciplinary approach that establishes a dialogue between law, history, anthropology and sociology. These disciplines mobilized and articulated in a coherent manner, make it possible to move away from the law in its positive form by “historicizing” it, socializing it, and reintegrating it into the historical, social, and political environments of its emergence and contemporary practice.

Marie Robin is a third-year Ph.D. student in French colonial history at Columbia University where she studies the intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, and military culture in the 20th-century French Empire. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled, “Managing Sex Overseas in the French Army: Bordel Militaire de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels), Sexual Violence and Decolonization in Algeria and Vietnam (c. 1940-1960s),” provides the first comprehensive analysis of the strategies, policies, and practices employed by the French military to regulate and control sexual behavior and relationships among its troops during the First Indochina War (1946-1954) and the Algerian War (1954-1962) and the impact of these policies on broader processes of decolonization.

Prior to starting her Ph.D. at Columbia, Marie graduated Summa Cum Laude with a BA in History and Middle-Eastern Studies from the American University of Paris (2017) and completed her MA in History at Durham University (2018). Marie writes public-facing history for the Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal on military prostitution and has translated chapters of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, vol. 1 & 3.

Mariana Katz is a PhD candidate in History at Columbia University. Her dissertation explores the relationship between state formation and regimes of unfree labor in postcolonial Latin America, with a focus on nineteenth-century Paraguay. Her research, funded by the Social Science Research Council, lies at the intersection of the history of popular politics, the social history of labor, comparative slavery studies, and the scholarship on state making. Prior to starting her graduate studies, Mariana studied history at the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, and conducted research on the history of workers and artisans in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. She has been involved in different public history initiatives, including working as a researcher and exhibition curator at the Museo Nacional del Cabildo in Buenos Aires and co-creating the podcast series The Sounds of Calibán: A History of Latin America through Music. At Columbia, she collaborates with with Separated: An Oral History Project, which documents the experiences of families separated by the Trump Administration’s Zero Tolerance Policy.

Mame Mor Ndiaye is a first-year PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Paris 1 Pantheon- Sorbonne University (ISJPS). I am writing a dissertation on “Western universalism and African philosophy: From the universal as principle to the achievement of its effectivity through the common prism of human rights”, under the supervision of the professor Magali Bessone. His research interests lie at the intersection of African philosophies, postcolonial studies and the decolonial approach, both of which are linked to Western philosophical theories.

Mame Mor received the first part of his academic education in Senegal up to the baccalaureate before joining the University of Lille in 2017, where he completed his undergraduate degree. Mame Mor obtained his Bachelor in philosophy (2018), before leaving for Sorbonne University for his first year of research master (2019). The following year, he returned to Lille University where he obtained a master degree in moral and political philosophy (2021), writing a Master thesis on the following topic: "Civil liberty and political liberty in Rousseau's thought", (passed with honors) under the supervision of Pr. Gabrielle Radica. After his master in philosophy, Mame Mor decided to do a second master in business administration at Sorbonne University thanks to an apprenticeship program with Paris City Hall which he obtained last year (2022). However, this year of transition made him feel how much he missed research and that this is what suits him best. Mame Mor decided to prepare a thesis project and to register for a PhD at Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University.

Maëlle Gélin is currently a Ph.D. candidate in history at Sciences Po Paris. Her work is at the crossroad of literature, intellectual history, and political history. Her Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the complex transatlantic circulations of the Négritude movement from the 1940s to the present day. Maëlle also teaches an undergraduate course on the history of the 20th and 21st centuries and she works as a teaching assistant for a graduate course on the intertwined relations between literature, history, and social sciences. Prior to joining the Center for History at Sciences Po, Maëlle completed a master’s degree in history at Sciences Po and taught history and geography in the secondary education.

Madeline Woker is a PhD student in International and Global History at Columbia University in New York. In June 2014, she obtained an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge. She holds also a Double Master in European Affairs from London School of Economics and Political Science and Sciences Po Paris. Her dissertation project examines the politics of taxation in the French colonial empire.

Luz Colpa is a fourth-year doctoral student in African history at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of household, family, and gender in twentieth-century West Africa and late-imperial France. Her dissertation is a history of out-marriage or marriage between individuals from different natal communities (1939-1980). From 2017-2018 She served as the Co-President of the Columbia Graduate History association.

Prior to starting her Ph.D. at Columbia, Luz graduated Summa cum Laude with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Stony Brook with Minors in Post-Colonial History and Literature. Luz then served as an ESL teacher in Peace Corps Azerbaijan (2012-2014). In 2016 she completed an M.A. in History and Literature at the Columbia Reid Hall Program in Paris. In 2017 she completed an M.A. in History and Civilization at the EHESS in Paris.

Lucile Dehouck is a PhD candidate working at the intersection of environment, development, and migration economics. In her thesis project entitled “Climate-induced forced migration”, she aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between migration and climate. To this end, Lucile uses econometric techniques and data science tools to provide new empirical evidence in those fields. She likes using satellite data and remote sensing products to help answer policy questions. As an applied development economist, she is also aiming to directly contribute to the knowledge of the impact of climate change in the Global South.

Before coming to Columbia, Lucile obtained a master’s degree in economics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay and Polytechnique.

Léa Dousset is a Ph.D. candidate at the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics under the supervision of Julien Grenet. Her research is in the field of the economics of education, with a particular focus on the under-representation of female students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) studies and careers in France.

She holds a dual B.A. from Sciences Po Paris in social sciences and in applied mathematics from Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, and a M.A. in economics from the EHESS, Paris School of Economics. Prior to starting her Ph.D. at the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, she worked as a research professional at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Manasi Desphande.

A graduate of the French National School of Public Administration (ENA) (Victor Hugo Year, 1989-91), Laurent Bili joined the French Foreign Ministry’s Strategic Affairs and Disarmament Directorate (1991-93).

Seconded to the Defense Ministry as Deputy Diplomatic Adviser (1993-95), he then held several positions at the Quai d’Orsay:

• First Secretary and then Second Counsellor at the Embassy of France in Ankara (1995-99),
• First Secretary, Permanent Representative of France to the Western European Union (WEU) (1998-2000),
• Adviser to the European Union’s interim Political and Security Committee (PSC) in Brussels (2000-02),
• Head of Strategic Affairs (2002).

In 2002, he was Director of the Private Office of the Minister Delegate for European Affairs and became technical adviser at the Diplomatic Unit of the Presidency of the French Republic (2002-07).

He successively held the positions of Ambassador to Thailand (2007-09), Director of the Defense Minister’s Civilian and Military Office (2009-10), Ambassador to Turkey (2011-15) and then to Brazil (2015-17).

Laurent Bili was then Director-General for Global Affairs, Culture, Education and International Development at the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and G7/G20 Sous-Sherpa (2017-2019).

Prior to his appointment in Washington, Laurent Bili was Ambassador to China since September 2019.

Laure Colin joined the Centre de Recherche en Gestion of l'École Polytechnique in September 2021 after working in a Parisian consulting firm.

Her thesis focuses on the management of defense innovation projects and the functioning of the French public defense innovation agency.

Laura Chaubard, Director-General of École polytechnique has also been entrusted with the interim role of president of the School's Board of Directors, as of September 17th, 2023.

Eric Labaye's term as Chairman of X, which he had held since 2018, ended on September 16th. Eric Labaye's role as President of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris also came to an end on this date. École polytechnique is one of the founding Schools of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, alongside ENSTA Paris, ENSAE Paris, Télécom Paris and Télécom SudParis.

The ministerial order appointing Laura Chaubard, issued by the Minister of the Armed Forces on September 13th, states that the Director General of the École Polytechnique, "is responsible for acting as president of the Board of Directors of the École Polytechnique, as of September 17th, 2023".

At the same time, Professor Thierry Coulhon was appointed acting Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris.

After completing her studies at École Polytechnique, Laura Chaubard joined the Corps de l’Armement, a high level engineer and public servant body in charge of the French State armament policy, and pursued a PhD in algorithms at the University of Paris Diderot (Paris VII), focusing on the theory of formal languages from 2002 to 2006.

In September 2006, she joined the General Directorate for Armament (DGA), the French Defense procurement agency, where she held technical responsibilities for six years as an expert in big data and artificial intelligence. Between 2013 and 2016, she was head of the strategic SMEs office in charge of identifying, accompanying and supporting the 600 French SMEs of interest to the Ministry for Armed Forces. From January to August 2017, still within the DGA, she was in charge of budget programming. There, she supervised the work of preparing the 2018-2022 Military Programming Law, in a context of a historic increase in resources for the Ministry for Armed Forces.

In August 2017, she was appointed advisor for innovation and digital technology in the cabinet of the Minister of Armed Forces, Florence Parly. There, she successfully led the creation of the Defense Innovation Agency, the "Definvest" investment fund, the General Directorate of Digital Technology, as well as the drafting of the "Artificial Intelligence" roadmap of the Ministry for Armed Forces.

She took up her position as CEO of the Établissement Public du Parc et de la Grande Halle de la Villette (EPPGHV) in October 2019. Located in the northeast region of Paris, La Villette encompasses a national museum of science and technology, a major architectural complex devoted to music and an urban park dedicated to culture and open to all.

At the head of this public cultural institution, Laura Chaubard was in charge of coordinating the fifty or so players present on site and of supervising the multidisciplinary artistic program hosted in the Grande Halle de la Villette, the park or the new venues staging performances and events

Laura Chaubard is a Knight of the National Order of Merit and a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

Kees van der Beek has been appointed Vice-Provost for Research at École Polytechnique, effective as of February 1, 2023. He will report to Dominique Rossin, Provost, and will succeed Benoît Deveaud. He is in charge of defining the strategy and supervising all activities of the Institution’s 23 research laboratories. He is a member of École Polytechnnique’s Executive Committee and Institut Polytechnique de Paris’ Teaching and Research Committee.

Native of the Netherlands and a physicist by profession, Kees van der Beek began his career as a researcher in the United States in 1996 at Argonne National Laboratory. Two years later and back in Europe, he started a second post-doctorate at the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) within the Institut de Génie Atomique.

Kees van der Beek continued his career in France from January 1997 at École Polytechnique, as a researcher assigned to Irradiated Solids Laboratory (LSI). From 2002 to 2015, he carried out his research activity in conjunction with teaching at École Polytechnique. In 2009, thanks to his Habilitation to Supervise Research, he obtained the title of Director of Research. He directed LSI from January 2014 until May 2017.

In January 2019, he was assigned to the Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies in Palaiseau. He also joined the CNRS Institute of Physics. In January 2021, he was appointed Assistant to the Scientific Director (ADSR) at the CNRS for the Grenoble-Alpes site.

Simultaneously, Kees became Director of the "Physics of Light and Matter" (PhOM) Research Department of the ComUE Université Paris-Saclay from January 2016 to December 2020, then Director of the "Physics of Light and Matter" (PhOM) axis of the Graduate School of Physics of the same university in 2021. The same year, he also became Director of Institut Intégratif des Matériaux of Université Paris-Saclay.

Author of nearly 180 publications in international scientific journals, the new Vice-Provost for Research at École Polytechnique was chairman of the Condensed Matter Physics Division of French Physical Society from 2009 to 2013, chairman of the Condensed Matter Physics Division of the European Physical Society from 2015 to 2020, and he is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society. It has allowed him to establish numerous European contacts, notably through the Institute of Physics (UK), the Deutsche Physikalischen Gesellschaft (Germany), and the Real Sociedad Española de Física (Spain).

Kees van der Beek graduated from University of Leiden in 1988 and 1992 and holds a Diploma in Experimental Solid-State Physics and a PhD in Mathematics and Natural Sciences.

Justine Brisson is currently a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Sciences Po Paris. She holds a MA in Modern Literature from the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, a MA in Political Philosophy (first year) from the École Normale Supérieure, and a MA in Political Theory from Sciences Po. She has taught literature and the history of political ideas at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and at Sciences Po. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Fabula-LhT. Littérature, histoire, théorie. Her research is at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and political theory. More precisely, she studies the relations between politics and literature in mid-twentieth century France, focusing on the theme of the “neutral” in the works of Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Emil Cioran. She aims to question the ethical meaning of the temptation to withdraw from the political. Before joining Columbia, she was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, where she worked on Blanchot’s archives at the Houghton Library. She has published articles on Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Guillaume Dustan and Pascal Quignard.

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Julius is a PhD candidate at Paris School of Economics and Université Paris 1. His research examines alternative peer-to-peer sharing platforms that limit the use of money. He investigates how these restrictions affect user behavior and what they imply for the market design of these platforms. A large part of his dissertation focuses on a popular online platform for trading holiday homes with token money. These tokens are earned by hosting others and can only be spent on visiting other platform users. Using economics theory and econometric techniques for causal inference, Julius studies the design of prices with token money and the impact of interactions with people of different backgrounds on users’ trust. He is also interested in how prices and users’ dual role as hosts and guests shape norms of behavior. Recently, he has started exploring related questions on BlaBlaCar.

Julius holds a MA in Economics and a BA in Philosophy and Economics. Prior to his Master's, he worked at the Center for Impact Evaluations (C4ED), where he evaluated public policies in his field, and at the digital economy department of the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW), where he studied e-commerce and online ratings.

Julia Tomasson is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Columbia University studying the history of science, mathematics, knowledge and material culture, focused on early modern Mediterranean textual cultures. Her research explores how our current standards of proof and persuasion came to be and how other forms and ideals developed and came to be thinkable and unthinkable in different contexts. Her graduate work at Columbia University has been supported by numerous fellowships, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and two Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (Classical Arabic). Tomasson holds an A.B. from the University of Chicago and an M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia University.

Judith Roze joined the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in September 2021 as Deputy Cultural Counselor and Deputy Director of Villa Albertine.

A graduate of the École normale supérieure, Judith holds an MA in Classics from the Sorbonne. After studying and working in the UK for 3 years, she worked in Paris as a journalist and literary translator, publishing various works of fiction by American, Canadian, and British writers in French translation.

In 2010, she joined the Institut français, the French cultural relations agency, as Deputy Director and then Director of its French Language, Books and Ideas Department. In this position, she worked closely with the French cultural network around the world to foster intercultural exchange through intellectual debate, French-teaching activities, translation programs, and worldwide events like the Night of Ideas.

She now assists the Director in the management of Villa Albertine.

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Jean Makhlouta is currently a PhD Candidate in Geography at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne under the supervision of Nadine Cattan and Stéphanie Dadour. His dissertation focuses on queer practices and mobilities in Beirut and their potential to rethink the urban structure of the city. His research  interests lie at the intersection of Urban studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Gender studies.

Jean is affiliated to research units Géographie-cités (CNRS, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Université Paris Cité, EHESS) and Architecture, Culture, Société (CNRS, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais). He also serves as a teaching assistant at the Department of Geography at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Prior to starting his PhD, Jean completed an MA in Architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais where he graduated with distinction.

Janina S. Santer is a Ph.D. student and Richard Hofstadter Fellow in the History Department at Columbia University, researching the history of the Lebanese state in the 1940s-1950s. Before moving to New York, she completed a MA in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and her work has been published in Arabic translation in Bidayat °28-29/2020 (Nashʿat al-qiṭāʿ al-siyāḥī wa namūdhaj “lubnān swīsrā al-sharq”). Her interests include the social and cultural history of modern Lebanon, and she is currently developing a public history project about Radio al-Sharq (1930s 1960s) in collaboration with UMAM Center for Documentation and Research.

Idriss Fofana is a Ph.D. candidate in international and global history at Columbia University and a recent graduate of Yale Law School. He specializes in the history of international law and other forms of inter-polity order in Asia and Africa since the eighteenth century. He is especially interested in historical and contemporary attempts to regulate migration. His work spans the fields of modern Chinese history, the modern history of Atlantic Africa as well as the history of twentieth-century anti-colonial and Third World movements.

His dissertation is titled “The ‘Chinese Solution’ to the Labor Question in Africa: Chinese Workers, African Railroads & the International Regulation of Labor Migration, 1860-1935.” It investigates how European colonial administrations’ long-held ambition to use Chinese labor to exploit resources in tropical Africa gave way to a series of novel experiments in the regulation of labor and migration in southern China, Senegambia, and the Congo basin during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Florian Cafiero is currently a Ph.D. student at Sciences Po Medialab, under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Philippe Cointet. His thesis focuses on the debate between pro- and anti-vaccine activists and its reception by the public. An Ecole Normale Supérieure - Paris-Saclay alumnus, he holds an MPhil. in Digital Humanities from Ecole Nationale des Chartes - Paris Sciences et Lettres Université (PSL). He has taught quantitative methods applied to social sciences and the humanities at the Geneva University, Ecole Nationale des Chartes (PSL), and Université d’Orléans. His works in computational social science and quantitative linguistics have been published in journals such as Science Advances, Social Networks, or Social Science and Medicine.

Fatima-Ezzahrae Touilila is a doctoral candidate and a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Prior
to this, she completed a dual degree in Law and Political Science at Sciences Po (Paris) and Columbia University and was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Religion, Culture and Public Life (New York). Her research interests include Critical Theory, the epistemological ruptures in the making of Modernity, tradition, and memory, Judeo-Islamic syncretism in Morocco.

Her current project investigates the intellectual history and political theory that buttressed French colonization in Northwest Africa. 

Farah is a Ph.D. candidate in Public International Law at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne under the supervision of Professor Paolo Palchetti. Farah is a graduate of Economics and Political Science from McGill University, a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Law in London, and a holder of two master’s degrees: a master’s in Public International & International Organizations’ Law from Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a master’s in International Studies and Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). She is also a New York State Attorney.

Farah’s research focuses on the duty of non-recognition and attempts to understand its relevance in contemporary international law as a collective and solidary enforcement mechanism by States, its ever-growing place in the effectivity versus legality dichotomy as well as its application in other areas of international law beyond territorial acquisitions, such as within treaty law, immunity law and humanitarian law, in addition to its application to other actors such as international corporations.

Between her undergraduate and graduate years, Farah worked as a management consultant for EY in Abu Dhabi, an Analyst for the United Nations Resident Coordinator Office in Bahrain and a Consultant for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris working closely with various sovereign states.

Evan Grégoire is a dual Ph.D. candidate specializing in political theory at Columbia University and Sciences Po, working with Nadia Urbinati (Columbia) and Bernard Reber (Sciences Po). His dissertation seeks to answer the question, “under what conditions can deliberation work?" paying particular attention to the collegial and deliberative governance of professional service firms.

Evan Grégoire is a 2022-2023 Fulbright recipient. Prior to enrolling at Columbia, Mr. Grégoire received four master’s degrees with distinction from the École Normale Supérieure Ulm (in philosophy, with a concentration in contemporary philosophy), Paris Sciences et Lettres, Sciences Po (in political science, with a concentration in political theory) and HEC Paris (in management, with a concentration in sustainability and social innovation). He was a visiting student at Scuola Superiori Sant’Anna (Italy), Scuola di Studi Superiori "Ferdinando Rossi"(Italy), and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). As part of his Ph.D., Mr. Grégoire taught courses in political science and management both at Sciences Po and Columbia University
and participated in the grading of graduate-level exams (notably, at the School of Management and Impact, the Paris School of International Affairs and Columbia School of Professional Studies).

Mr. Grégoire is a French citizen with fluency and international work experience in English and French. He also worked for leading companies including Mazars (the largest French consultancy) and Carrefour (the largest European food retailer), as well as top universities including the University of Bristol and ESCP Business School and international organisations (UNESCO). He speaks fluent French and Spanish which helped him conduct foresight analysis, write policy briefs and recommendations, as well as lead stakeholder engagement tasks.

Erica Ceola is from Italy. She began her studies in 2013 at Trento’s University, in Italy, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations in 2016. Then she majored in History with a Master’s degree at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, in Italy, with the final grade of 110/110 with honors (4.0 G.P.A.). After studying for one year at the University of Paris Sorbonne as an Erasmus student, Erica decided to pursue an academic path at the Panthéon Sorbonne Graduate School of History, in Paris. She started her Ph. D. during the academic year 2019-2020 with a doctoral thesis on Italian Migration history concerning mass emigration from the north of Italy to Arkansas, between the 1880s and the 1950s. Despite the sanitary situation, during the first year of her Ph.D., Erica conducted primary source research in Italy, especially through the scholarship that the École Française de Rome attributed to her in September 2020. Since May 2020, Erica has had the honor of being accepted as a fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations, a partner institution of College de France and Sorbonne Universities, which are associated through common researches topics, such as international migrations. 

Emmanuel Kattan is Director of the Alliance Program. He was previously Director of the British Council in New York, where he oversaw academic collaboration programs. He created partnerships with the Henry Luce Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation to launch initiatives connecting higher education institutions across the Atlantic. Before joining the British Council, Emmanuel was Senior Adviser at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, where he managed strategic communications and engagement with academic communities. He also held senior positions at the Commonwealth Secretariat and at the Quebec Delegation in London, where he was in charge of academic relations programs. A native of Montreal, Emmanuel studied politics at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and earned a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of four books: an essay on the politics of memory and three novels.

Elya Assayag is a history PhD student at Columbia University. Elya studies the seams between legal systems and society during the colonial period in Morocco (1912-1956), in addition to studying physical seams in the history of Moroccan embroidery. Through diverse methodologies, she tries to follow the day-to-day lives of women in colonial Morocco, that are absent from textual archives. Besides trying to figure out her academic path, she volunteers with refugees and asylum seekers, and tries to do something useful with the law degree she obtained a few years ago.

Ekaterina Oger Grivnova is currently a lawyer with Allen & Overy Paris office. She has experience advising on commercial and investment arbitration cases from a broad spectrum of sectors conducted under various arbitration rules.

Ekaterina holds a Master’s degree in Arbitration and International Business Law from the University of Versailles and pursues her PhD degree at Sorbonne Law School. Her thesis is focused on Inadmissibility of Claims in International Arbitration.

She also teaches International Arbitration at Paris Bar School, intervenes as a guest lecturer in other institutions and coaches student teams for various moot courts.

Ekaterina is an Editorial Board Member of Arbitration.ru, arbitration journal in English and Russian by Russian Arbitration Association, Co-chair of Paris Very Young Arbitration Practitioners (PVYAP) and administrator of MetaverseLegal, decentralised community dedicated to legal implications of the Metaverse and Web3.

Dominique Rossin (X1994) has been appointed Provost of École Polytechnique. Since 2015, Dominique Rossin was Vice-Provost for Education at the School. Since 2019, he has been in charge of the Teaching Committee for the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. Since 2020, he has been the French Dean of the European University EuroteQ.

Dominique Rossin holds a PhD in Computer Science from the École Polytechnique and is a specialist in algorithmics and combinatorics. He led a team at the University of Paris Diderot for seven years before joining the École Polytechnique's Computer Science Laboratory (LIX) in 2010.

He was recruited as a lecturer at l’X in 2003, in the computer science department and has been accredited to supervise research since 2007. Between 2012 and 2014, he joined the Ministry of Higher Education and Research as Deputy Delegate for Research and Technology in charge of the Paris region.

Dominique Rossin has led several major projects for the School: the creation of the Bachelor's program, the creation of the eight Masters of Science and Technology, the development of continuing education and the creation of the Executive Master's program, as well as leading the project to reform the Ingénieur Polytechnicien Program. Dominique Rossin has also played a key role in the evolution of teaching practices and the development of e-learning and MOOCs.

Dennis Mitchell has been named Interim Provost, effective July 1, 2023. Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger shared the news in an email to faculty and administrators this afternoon, explaining that it was a joint decision with President-Designate Minouche Shafik.

President Bollinger praised Mitchell’s long record of service and contributions to the University community and expressed gratitude to him for agreeing to take on this interim appointment. 

The move comes as Mary Boyce prepares to step down as Provost on June 30, 2023, and return to teaching and research full time. Shafik will launch a search for her permanent successor after taking office on July 1. Mitchell will remain Executive Vice President for University Life during the transition.

Clélia Lacam is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in African History at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her research, under the supervision of Anne Hugon, focuses on women and missions in colonial Gabon (1842-1961), through a connected study of Catholic nuns, Protestant missionary women and converted African women. By considering religious archives, “propaganda” literature and iconographic collections, she examines how the missionary experience reshaped gender relations and paved the way to a new female agency.

Clélia Lacam received her M.Phil. in African History from the same university, and she was awarded the 2021 Mnémosyne Prize for the best French masters dissertation on women’s and gender history. Thanks to this prize, she published her first book in 2023 (Le Bleu et le Noir. Jeux de pouvoirs dans une mission catholique féminine, Gabon, 1911-1955). In addition to her research, she teaches Modern European History at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University. She plans to visit Columbia University to conduct documentary research in Protestant missionary archives in New York City and Philadelphia.

Carlos J. Alonso is the Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor in the Humanities. He came to the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia in fall 2005 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Edwin B. and Leonore R. Williams Professor of Romance Languages. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Latin American intellectual history and cultural production, and in contemporary literary and cultural theory. He is the author of Modernity and Autochthony: The Spanish American Regional Novel (Cambridge UP), and The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (Oxford UP), and editor of Julio Cortázar: New Readings (Cambridge UP). He was also Editor of PMLA—arguably the premier journal of literary criticism and theory—during 2000-03, and edited the Hispanic Review in 2003-06, a period that ushered in changes that led to an award in 2005 for best journal design by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. While at Penn, Prof. Alonso was the recipient of a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the university's highest award for pedagogical excellence.

At Columbia he was chair of the department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures from 2005-10, and was Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society for four years. He has taught recently the required graduate seminar on "Literary and Cultural Theory" and the course "Theories of Culture in Latin America." Under his editorship the department's Revista Hispánica Moderna received the 2009 Council of Editors of Learned Journals Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement.
Prof. Alonso became Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in July 2011.

Camille Toussaint is a Ph.D. student from the Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation and the Management Research Center (École Polytechnique, France) since 2019. She is also an assistant professor at the Management of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Department of the École Polytechnique. Her Ph.D. research focuses on global collective action problems, and more specifically on the management of space debris. She is interested as well in commons theory, public-private partnerships, standardization, and market creation processes.

Camille Braune is currently in the second year of her Ph.D thesis at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, under the joint supervision of Professor Sandra Laugier and Professor Isabelle Alfandary, which is titled: “For a new ethics of attention to language. From the work of the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)”.

Her research is part of the continuity, renewal and improvement of Franco-British studies on Iris Murdoch to date, in a common literary, philosophical, and ethical movement. My thesis intends to propound a new ethics of attention to language as a singular moral project, which Iris Murdoch intuited in her first writings, based on the one hand on a very specific idea of what it is to be attentive to language and on the other hand on the new form of attention to
ordinary life defined by literature, as an authentic experience which change moral thought and enrich our different forms of life.

In Fall 2022, Camille has been the recipient of two British fellowships: the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars awarded by the Iris Murdoch Society, and the “Monthly Scholarship” awarded by the Maison Française of Oxford.

In addition to her doctoral dissertation, Camille has worked for two French publishing houses, Esprit magazine and CNRS Éditions, as she is very passionate about editing.

After a bachelor degree in political sciences specialized in transition studies in Central and Eastern Europe, Aude-Cécile Monnot spent a year in Prague at Charles University. There, she nurtured her curiosity for Post-Soviet studies and the history of the Soviet Union. After studying Russian during her first academic years, she graduated from the National Institute of Language and Oriental Civilization in Paris, with a major in Farsi.

In 2013 Aude-Cécile started a Ph.D. on the history of Soviet Central Asia, focusing on issues of justice and legal practices at the local level. This everyday history of justice lies at the cross-road of different specialties such as state building, practices of power, legal history and colonial studies. Therefore Aude-Cécile uses a research framework that borrows from other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and political sciences. 

Arnaud Maurel is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. He specializes in comparative politics, political economy, and political methodology, with a regional focus on Western Europe. His research primarily investigates the micro and institutional foundations of public debt crises. His dissertation explores how voters’ preferences, politicians’ strategies, and fiscal institutions shape the routine use of public debt. Other projects include a formal model of strategic sovereign default and an empirical study of the impact of tax evasion scandals on preferences for redistribution.

Arnaud Maurel received his B.A. (Cum Laude) and his M.A. in Political Science (Summa Cum Laude) from Sciences Po Paris. Prior to coming to Columbia, he worked as a Postgraduate Fellow at New York University, and as a statistical analyst at the O.E.C.D.

Anna Safronova is a Ph.D. candidate at the History department at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in France. Her thesis is on the history of the cooperative movement in Russia: actors, practices, and institutions, 1861-1932, and she works under the supervision of Professor Marie-Pierre Rey. Anna specializes in the social, political, and economic history of the late Russian Empire and early Soviet period. Although Anna hasn't finished her thesis yet, she already has experience organizing scientific conferences and research seminars with the researchers from her home institution as well as professors from other institutions as well. Anna believes that working with specialists from different institutions, the cooperation between scholars of different universities is a rich source of insights that are fruitful for research. Anna is the author of several articles in French journals. Her most recent publication is a book chapter in an edited collection on the history of cooperatives.

In addition to her research subject on cooperatives, she is particularly interested in the research of material history, the way the ordinary objects conserve traces of their usage, the biography of objects. In the future, she would like to organize a research seminar on the material history of soviet objects and to strengthen the connections that she hopes to build during her doctoral mobility.

Amy Hungerford, a longtime Yale professor and academic administrator, has been appointed executive vice president for Arts and Sciences and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her appointment begins January 1.

A scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, Hungerford comes to Columbia after leading Yale’s humanities division since 2016. In that role, she oversaw a major capital project to create a central hub for humanities on Yale’s campus and efforts to increase cross-school collaborations. 

As head of Columbia’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Hungerford will oversee the twenty-eight departments whose members teach students at Columbia College, the School of General Studies, the School of the Arts, the School of Professional Studies, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Amy’s career has combined notable scholarship and tireless mentoring with a wealth of experience in administering core academic programs,” said President Lee C. Bollinger. “Her oversight of twenty-three humanities departments and programs at Yale has demonstrated a talent for effective stewardship of resources and for the recruitment, hiring, and advancement of the highest-caliber faculty.”

Hungerford succeeds Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist who has served as interim executive vice president for Arts and Sciences since September 2018, when statistics professor David Madigan stepped down after five years in the position.

Alice Lasvergnas is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Sciences Po Paris. She specializes in democratic theory, the history of ideas, the philosophy of social science and the sociology of quantification. Her main topic of interest is the redefinition of democratic participation in mass societies.

Her research currently investigates the influence of methodological debates in American political science in the 1940s on the redefinition of democratic ideals in the 1960s. Her goal is to contrast different approaches of individual action based on scientific practices to then confront early definitions of participatory democracy.

Ms Lasvergnas holds a Master’s degree in political theory from Sciences Po Paris and a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and history.

Julie Louws holds a Master’s degree in International private Law and international Business (Paris 1
University) and two Bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and law.

Julie is a Ph.D. candidate in International Private Law at Sorbonne Law School, entering her third year under the supervision of Professor Pascal de Vareilles-Sommières. Julie's thesis is about the power of the judge concerning foreign law enforcement in France. She is trying to understand how foreign law is researched, interpreted, and analyzed by the judge. In the French legal system, the judge is conceived as being passive, he is not an actor. This representation of the judge is incrementally changing due to the new prevailing role of international jurisdiction which tends to give more power to national judges. This « realistic » approach needs to be compared with
the American legal system. Julie also is a teaching assistant, she has taught International Private Law and International Arbitration. This year she will teach Contract Law and Civil Procedure. 

Christine Neau-Leduc est désormais la nouvelle présidente de l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Elle est la deuxième femme à occuper ce poste après Hélène Ahrweiler en 1976. Elle succède ainsi à Georges Haddad et à l’administration provisoire qui assurait la gestion de l’établissement depuis le 2 septembre  2020 sur mandat du recteur de la région académique Île-de-France.

Ash is a platform on which each actor is able to sell its digital creations without any intermediary. For instance, it is possible to directly publish an ebook and send it to readers, raise funds for a new episode of a web series or share the development costs of a software plug-in between interested customers.

In practice, encrypted offers transit freely without any entity to control or influence the user. The peer-to-peer encryption protocol used by Ash ensures the privacy of personal data thanks to cutting-edge technology.