Scientific 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.

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.

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. 

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

With Meditect, patients and health professionals can scan their box of medicine to verify its authenticity and benefit from several information such as posology in different languages.

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.

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.

Mary C. Boyce is the Provost of Columbia University. From 2013 to 2021, she was dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor. In that role, she led the education and research mission of Columbia Engineering with more than 230 faculty, 1,700 undergraduate students and 3,000 graduate students.

A strong advocate for interdisciplinary research and innovation, Boyce significantly increased the faculty in cross-cutting fields, expanded funding for faculty and student research together with design and entrepreneurship programming, and strengthened outreach efforts to attract diverse talent to Engineering. During her tenure, she also oversaw a robust program of renovations, build-outs, and expansions to spaces, including research laboratories, shared facilities, undergraduate teaching laboratories, gathering spaces, and creation of the Columbia Makerspace. In 2016, she launched an inspiring new vision for the school, Columbia Engineering for Humanity.

Boyce’s own research focuses on nonlinear mechanics of soft materials; she has been widely recognized for her scholarly achievements, including election as a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. Most recently, Boyce was recognized with the ASME 2020 Timoshenko Medal, considered the highest scholarly recognition in the field of applied mechanics.

She earned her BS degree in engineering science and mechanics from Virginia Tech, and her MS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gaëtan Bruel took on his new role as Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy in the United States on September 3, 2019.

A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, with an academic background as a historian, throughout his career he has specialized in cultural issues, working at multiple French ministries, and overseeing two of France's most important national monuments.

Since 2017, he has been an adviser to the French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs, in charge of the Americas and cultural diplomacy. In this position, he closely followed the political, military, economic, commercial, and cultural relationship between France and the United States, while working on French cultural diplomacy around the world.

Previously, he worked at the French Ministry of Culture, as an administrator of the Arc de Triomphe and the Pantheon. Responsible for overseeing the restoration of these monuments and hosting nearly three million visitors to these sites each year. During this time, he helped renew the cultural and educational programming at these two icons of the French Republic. He has also worked at the French Ministry of Defense, as adviser to the Minister in charge of culture, helping to establish relationships with universities and think-tanks, and creating a "cinema" program to develop ties between producers, screenwriters and the French military.

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. 

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. 

Eric Labaye graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, Télécom ParisTech and INSEAD . He was previously senior associate director at McKinsey & Company, where he headed the French office and chaired the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm's macroeconomic research institute. He was a member of the global executive committee in charge of intellectual capital as well as the board of directors of the company. He is also a member of the Telecom ParisTech School Council, the ESSEC International Advisory Board and the Strategic Advisory Board of the Sciences Po School of Public Affairs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.