60 Notable alumni of Paris Descartes University

Yoann Deslot is a French former competitive figure skater. He placed 12th in his senior Grand Prix debut at the 2008 Trophée Eric Bompard.

Otmar Seul was born on August 30, 1943, in Trier and held lectures at the Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense (Paris X-Nanterre) from October 1989 to September 2011 as a professor of legal German. In cooperation with his German counterpart Werner Merle, he founded the integrated curriculum of French and German law in 1994–1995, joining together the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense...

Andrzej Aleksander Włodarczyk, known as André Wlodarczyk, is a Polish-French linguist.

Estel-Anaïs Hubaud is a French competitor in synchronized swimming who competed in the 2013 World Aquatics Championships.

Charlotte Hym is a French street skateboarder and neuroscientist based in Paris.

Yanick Paternotte was a member of the National Assembly of France, representing the Val-d'Oise department, from 2007 to 2012, as a member of the Union for a Popular Movement.

Joséphine Ouédraogo is a Burkinabé sociologist and politician. She served as Minister of Justice of Burkina Faso from 2014 to 2016.

Nadey S. Hakim FRCS FRCSI FACS FASMBS, is a British-Lebanese professor of transplantation surgery at Imperial College London and general surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic London. He is also a writer, musician and sculptor, known for kidney and pancreas transplantations, and being part of the surgical team that performed the world's first hand transplantation in 1998 and then the double...

Didier Baichère is a French politician who has been serving as a member of the National Assembly since 18 June 2017, representing the department of Yvelines. He is a member of Renaissance (RE).

Ammar Belhimer is an Algerian public law teacher and journalist, who had served as Minister of Communication and spokesperson in the first Djerad government since 4 January 2020, and then in the first Benabderrahmane government from January 4, 2020 until November 11, 2021.

Ramata Ly-Bakayoko is an Ivorian academic and government official. She served as Ivory Coast's Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research from 2016 to 2018. She was appointed Minister of Women, Families, and Children in 2018. She was appointed permanent delegate of Côte d'Ivoire to UNESCO with residence in Paris on September 8, 2021.

Philippe Méaille is a French author and art collector, and the founder and president of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently, Méaille owns the world's largest collection of Art & Language works.

Wim E. Crusio is a Dutch behavioral neurogeneticist and a directeur de recherche (research director) with the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Talence, France.

Guy Henniart is a French mathematician at Paris-Sud 11 University. He is known for his contributions to the Langlands program, in particular his proof of the local Langlands conjecture for GL(n) over a p-adic local field—independently from Michael Harris and Richard Taylor—in 2000.

Salim Ben Hamidane is a Tunisian politician. He serves as the Minister of State Domains and Land Affairs under Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali.

Edward "Ed" Cooke is a British entrepreneur and author of Remember, Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could. He is also a Grand Master of Memory and the co-founder of Memrise, a freemium online educational platform that uses memory techniques to optimise learning. He grew up in Oxfordshire.

Louis-Jean Calvet was a French linguist.

Jacques Sémelin is a French historian and political scientist. He is a professor at Sciences Po Paris and senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. His main fields of study are the Holocaust, mass violence, civil resistance and rescue in genocidal situations, and more recently the survival of Jews in France during the Second World War. In...

Jean-Michel Oughourlian is an Armenian-French neuropsychiatrist and psychologist as well as a writer and philosopher recognized both in France and the United States for his collaboration with René Girard and his work on the mimetic theory of desire. Since the early 1970s he has devoted both his clinical work and his research to applying and developing Girard's theories in the...

Charles Saint-Prot is a French geopolitician and writer. He is a historian specializing in international relations and geopolitics, in particular, questions of the Middle East and the Islamic world. Saint-Prot is the director of the Observatoire d'études géopolitiques (Observatory of geopolitical studies) in Paris, a research center on the international relations, and is the director, with Zeina el Tibi, of...

Gérard Klein, known also as Gilles, is a French science fiction writer with sociological training.

Guillaume Chiche is a French politician who was elected to the French National Assembly on 18 June 2017, representing the department of Deux-Sèvres. He was considered a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron. He was elected as a member of La République En Marche!, but left the party and in May 2020, he was one of the 17 initial members...

Henriette Walter is a French linguist, emeritus professor of French at the University of Rennes 2, and director of the Phonology Laboratory at the École pratique des hautes études at the Sorbonne. She is known for both her specialized academic work and her popular linguistics publications.

Lionel Naccache is a French neurologist and specialist in cognitive neuroscience.

Ruwen Ogien was a contemporary French philosopher. He was a researcher (directeur de recherche) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He focused on moral philosophy and the philosophy of social science. He was the brother of Albert Ogien a sociologist.

Gérard Chaliand was a Belgian-born French expert in geopolitics who published widely on irregular warfare and military strategy. Chaliand's analyses of insurgencies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, mostly based on his field experience with insurgent forces, have appeared in more than 20 books and in numerous newspaper articles.

Nikola Dimitrov Petkov was a Bulgarian politician, one of the leaders of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (usually abbreviated as BZNS). He entered politics in the early 1930s. Like many other peasant party leaders in Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria in 1945–1947, Petkov was tried and executed soon after postwar Soviet control was established in his country. State Department emissary, Mark...

Francine Leca was a French cardiac surgeon and professor of medicine specialising in heart surgery, a pioneer of the discipline in pediatrics.

Christian Noyer is a French economist who served as Governor of the Bank of France from 2003 to 2015. In this capacity, he chaired the Bank for International Settlements from 2010 until 2015. He had previously served as vice president of the European Central Bank from 1998 to 2002.

Pierre Birnbaum is a French historian and sociologist.

Marc Augé was a French anthropologist.

Marie Patouillet is a French cyclist who competes in C5 classification, physician, and LGBT+ activist.

Élizabeth Teissier is a French astrologer and former model and actress. Between 1975 and 1976, she created a daily horoscope on French television channel Antenne 2, and in 1981, she launched the Astro Show television programme in Germany. Her personal clients included former President of France François Mitterrand, and she has published several books on astrology. A test that compared...

Aymeric Chauprade is a French writer, political scientist and politician. He left the National Front on 9 November 2015, mostly for "moral and political" principles, to found Les Français Libres. A student and disciple of François Thual, he is an advocate of realpolitik. He was elected to the European Parliament from the National Front for the Île-de-France constituency in the...

Dominique Schnapper was a member of the Constitutional Council of France from 2001 to 2010.

Jon Elster is a Norwegian philosopher and political theorist who holds the Robert K. Merton professorship of Social Science at Columbia University and since 2005 professor of social science at the Collège de France.

Catherine Vautrin is a French politician who has been serving as Minister of the Armed Forces since 2025. She previously served as the Minister of Labour, Health, Solidarity, and Families in the successive governments of Prime Ministers François Bayrou and Sébastien Lecornu from 2024 to 2025.

Claude Malhuret is a French physician, lawyer and politician who has served as a member of the Senate since 2014, representing the department of Allier. A member of Horizons (HOR), he has presided over the centre-right The Independents – Republic and Territories (LIRT) parliamentary group in the Senate since 2017.

François Charles Amand Fillon is a French retired politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 2007 to 2012 under President Nicolas Sarkozy. He was the nominee of The Republicans (previously known as the Union for a Popular Movement), the country's largest centre-right political party, for the 2017 French presidential election in which he ranked third in the first...

Agnès Buzyn is a French hematologist, university professor, medical practitioner and politician who served as Minister of Solidarity and Health in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe from May 2017 to February 2020. A member of La République En Marche! (LREM), she was its candidate for Mayor of Paris in the 2020 election but failed to reach the second...

Richard Ferrand is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has served as President of the Constitutional Council since 8 March 2025. He previously served as President of the National Assembly from 2018 to 2022. He had served as a member of the National Assembly for Finistère's 6th constituency from 2012 to 2022. A longtime member of...

Olivier Brandicourt is a French business executive and physician, and the former chief executive officer of Sanofi.

Inès Boubakri is a Tunisian foil fencer. She is a four-time Olympian, who won a bronze medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics, and is a member of Association sportive de Bourg-la-Reine in France, under head coach Yann Detienne.

Sébastien Nadot, is a French historian, writer and politician. In the 2017 elections, he was elected as a member of La République En Marche! to the French National Assembly, representing the department of Haute-Garonne's 10th constituency. In December 2018, he was excluded from LREM for having voted against the 2019 draft budget. In May 2020, he was one of the...

François Héran is a French anthropologist and demographic sociologist.

Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is a professor at the Collège de France on the chair “Moral Questions and Social Issues in Contemporary Societies” and the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and holds a Direction of Studies in Political and Moral Anthropology at the École des...

Claude Hagège is a French linguist.

Laurent Lantieri is a French plastic surgeon who is a pioneer in the field of face transplantation. He performed the first second and third full face transplants. He was the first person to do a second face transplant on the same patient in 2018.

Jean Pisani-Ferry is a French economist and public policy expert. He is a fellow at think tanks Bruegel in Brussels and the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. He is also a senior professor in economics and public management at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and a professor at the European University Institute near Florence.

Jérôme Chartier is a French politician who represented the 7th constituency of the Val-d'Oise department in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2017. A member of The Republicans and its predecessor parties, he also served as the mayor of Domont from 1995 to 2016.

Sarah Hanffou is a Cameroonian table tennis player. She competed at the 2012 Summer Olympics in the women's singles. She beat Tvin Moumjoghlian in the preliminary round, before losing 4 - 1 to Xian Yi Fang in the first round proper.

Anne Genetet is a French medical doctor and politician of Renaissance (RE) who briefly served as the Minister of National Education in the Barnier government from September to December 2024. She represented the 11th constituency for French residents overseas in the National Assembly from 2017 to 2024.

Donatien Laurent was a French musicologist and linguist.

Patrick Karam is a French personality defending human rights. He is a researcher in international relations. He is the vice-president of the regional council of Île-de-France, responsible for youth, sports and community life.

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS; Paris, France). Author of books on Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Liberation Theology, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, José Carlos Mariátegui, Lucien Goldmann and...

Elizabeth de Portzamparc is a French-Brazilian architect.

Radhi Jazi was a Tunisian pharmacist. He founded the first Tunisian dispensary pharmacy and was one of the most famous dispensary pharmacists in the country's history.

Moez Chakchouk, born in Sousse on 12 July 1975, is the director of government affairs and regulatory policy at Packet Clearing House, the international organization responsible for providing operational support and security to critical internet infrastructure, including Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system. Chakchouk was previously the transport minister of Tunisia (2020-2021), assistant director-general for...

Habiba Bouhamed Chaabouni is professor of medical genetics at Tunis University.