100 Notable alumni of Paris Diderot University

Anne Abeillé is a French linguist specialising in French grammar and syntactic theory, in particular constraint-based grammar, as well as natural language processing. She led the creation of the French Treebank, the first syntactically-annotated corpus of French.

Nicolas Bernard Fiévé is a French historian of Japanese Architecture; he was born in Paris in 1959 and is the son of the cinema decorator, Bernard Fiévé. In 1993, he became a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and in 1996 he joined the Collège de France’s Japanese Civilization research team. In 2007, he was elected Professor...

Simon Harel is a Canadian writer and academic. He is a professor in the Département de littérature et langues du monde at the Université de Montréal and an adjunct professor at the Département d'études littéraires of the Université du Québec à Montréal. His research focuses on self-narratives, biographies, and autobiographies.

Noura Borsali was a Tunisian academic, journalist, writer, literary critic and film critic, as well as a trade unionist, a human rights activist and a figure of Tunisian feminism.

Maurice Dayan was a French psychoanalyst and university professor.

Sophia Ananiadou is a Greek-British computer scientist and computational linguist. She led the development of and directs the National Centre for Text Mining in the United Kingdom. She is also Professor in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

Marie Farge is a French mathematician and physicist who works as a director of research at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She is known for her research on wavelets and turbulence in fluid mechanics.

Jeon Soo-il is a South Korean film director, film producer and screenwriter. After graduating from the Department of Theatre & Film of Kyungsung University in Busan, he studied Film Direction at Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle (E.S.R.A) in France from 1988 to 1992. He completed his master and doctorate degrees in Film Science at the Paris Diderot University in Paris,...

Delphine Gardey is a French historian and sociologist. She is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the journal Travail, Genre et Sociétés. She is also affiliated with "Groupement De Recherche Européen"...

Dominique Pierre Perrin is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to coding theory and to combinatorics on words. He is a professor of the University of Marne-la-Vallée and currently serves as the President of ESIEE Paris.

Élodie Guégan is a French middle distance runner, who specialized in the 800 metres. She won two medals, silver and bronze, for the 800 metres at the 2005 European Athletics U23 Championships in Erfurt, Germany, and at the 2007 European Athletics U23 Championships in Debrecen, Hungary. She also set a personal best time of 1:58.93 by finishing fifth at the...

Beatriz Leonor Silveira Barbuy is a Brazilian astrophysicist. She was described in 2009 by Época magazine as one of the 100 most influential Brazilians. She is a professor at the Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas at the University of São Paulo, vice-president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and one of five winners of the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for...

Bernard Teissier is a French mathematician and a member of the Nicolas Bourbaki group. He has made major contributions to algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, specifically to singularity theory, multiplicity theory and valuation theory.

Rama Ayalon is an Israeli translator of French literature into Hebrew. She has translated over 100 books, encompassing classic and contemporary prose, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Her translations include important philosophical works such as Pensées by Blaise Pascal and Totalité et infini by Emmanuel Lévinas. Among the prose authors she has translated are Michel Houellebecq, Georges Simenon, Marguerite Duras, Guy de...

Monique Laurent is a French computer scientist and mathematician who is an expert in mathematical optimization. She is a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam where she is also a member of the Management Team. Laurent also holds a part-time position as a professor of econometrics and operations research at Tilburg University.

Arnaud Beauville is a French mathematician, whose research interest is algebraic geometry.

Pierre Berthelot was a French mathematician at the University of Rennes. He developed crystalline cohomology and rigid cohomology.

Arkan Simaan is a Lebanese-French novelist.

Françoise Thébaud is a French historian, professor emeritus of history, and specialist in the history of women. In 2017, she was awarded the Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.

Raphaël Alexis Marcel Rouquier is a French mathematician and a professor of mathematics at UCLA.

Fatou Sow is a Senegalese feminist sociologist specialising in sociology of gender.

Serge Vaudenay is a French cryptographer and professor, director of the Communications Systems Section at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

François Labourie is a French mathematician who has made various contributions to geometry, including pseudoholomorphic curves, Anosov diffeomorphisms, and convex geometry. In a series of papers with Yves Benoist and Patrick Foulon, he solved a conjecture on Anosov flows in compact contact manifolds.

Joris van der Hoeven is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, specializing in algebraic analysis and computer algebra. He is the primary developer of GNU TeXmacs.

Emmanuelle Lambert is a French writer.

Guillaume Jacques is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families and publishes about languages of other families such as Breton. His case studies in historical phonology are set in the framework of panchronic phonology, aiming to formulate...

Sihem Badi is a Tunisian politician. She served as the Minister of Women's Affairs under Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali.

François Grosjean is a Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Language and Speech Processing Laboratory at the University of Neuchâtel. His specialty is psycholinguistics and his domains of interest are the perception, comprehension and production of language, be it speech or sign language, in monolinguals and bilinguals. He also has interests in biculturalism, applied linguistics, aphasia, sign language, and...

Philippe Froguel is a French physician and scientist who serves as chair in Genomic Medicine in the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College London. His research has focused on the genetics of human diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. This includes research identifying the genes glucokinase and HNF1 risk factors for type 2 diabetes. In...

Stéphane Bortzmeyer is a French engineer specialised in computer networks.

Christof Wetterich is a German theoretical physicist. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the Heidelberg University. He is known for his work on the Seesaw mechanism in grand unification theory (GUT), quintessence, the Wetterich equation for the functional renormalization group (FRG) and asymptotic safety in quantum gravity.

Gérard Ben Arous is a French mathematician, specializing in stochastic analysis and its applications to mathematical physics. He served as the director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University from 2011 to 2016. Since November 13, 2025, he has served as Dean of the Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science.

Gérard Pierre Huet is a French computer scientist, linguist and mathematician. He is senior research director at INRIA and mostly known for his major and seminal contributions to type theory, programming language theory, and to the theory of computation.

Philippe Flajolet was a French computer scientist.

Evelyne Gebhardt is a German politician who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1994 to 2022. She is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, part of the Party of European Socialists.

Pascale Cossart is a French bacteriologist who is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Paris. She is the foremost authority on Listeria monocytogenes, a deadly and common food-borne pathogen responsible for encephalitis, meningitis, bacteremia, gastroenteritis, and other diseases.

Philippe J. Sansonetti is a French microbiologist, professor at the Pasteur Institute and the Collège de France in Paris. He is the director of the Inserm Unit 786 (Microbial colonisation and invasion of mucosa) and of the Institut Pasteur laboratory Pathogénie Microbienne Moléculaire.

Jean-Yves Beziau is a Swiss Professor in logic at the University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, and Researcher of the Brazilian Research Council. He is permanent member and former president of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy. Before going to Brazil, he was Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and researcher at Stanford...

Kamissa Camara is a Malian political analyst and politician. She is the former chief of staff to the President of the Malian Republic after her resignation on September 24, 2020.

Alain Borer is a French poet, travel writer, novelist, playwright, art critic, essayist, and specialist in the life and works of Arthur Rimbaud.

Hélène Esnault is a French and German mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry.

Sabrina Sebaihi is a French politician from The Ecologists. She became the Member of Parliament for Hauts-de-Seine's 4th constituency in the 2022 French legislative election.

Carlos Moore is a writer, social researcher, professor and activist, dedicated to the study of African and Afro-American history and culture. Moore holds two doctorates, in Human sciences and in Ethnology from the Paris Diderot University, and speaks five languages. At various periods he lived in France, Africa, the United States of America, Brazil and the Caribbean

Laura Chaubard is a French mathematician and the Director General of the École polytechnique, the first woman to hold this position at the engineering school. She is also the interim chair of the school's board of directors since 2023.

Gilles Bloch is a French polytechnicien, doctor of medicine and researcher in molecular biophysics, specializing in muscle and brain metabolism. He was director general of research and innovation from 2006 to 2009, then president of Paris-Saclay University between 2015 and 2018, and president of Inserm between 2019 and 2023. Since September 2023, he has served as President of the National...

Jean-Pierre Bourguignon is a French mathematician, working in the field of differential geometry.

Silvio Tendler was a Brazilian filmmaker. With more than 40 films released by 2014, including feature and short films, Tendler was one of the most respected Brazilian documentarists. Due to his focus on people like Juscelino Kubitschek, João Goulart, and Carlos Marighella, he was known as "the filmmaker of the defeated" or "the filmmaker of interrupted dreams".

Léa Fazer is a Swiss film director, screenwriter and actress. She studied film at the University Paris Diderot. Her film Bienvenue en Suisse was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

Pascale Ehrenfreund is an Austrian astrophysicist. Ehrenfreund holds degrees from the University of Vienna (Masters, molecular biology; PhD astrophysics, habilitation, astrochemistry) and Webster Leiden (Masters, management and leadership). Prior to becoming a Research Professor of Space Policy and International Affairs at George Washington University, she was a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, Leiden University, and University of Amsterdam in the...

Dominique Kalifa was a French historian, columnist and professor.

André Fernand Brahic was a French astrophysicist. He is known for his discovery (1984) of the rings of Neptune.

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is an Israeli-French artist, writer, psychoanalyst and philosopher based in France. Born in Mandatory Palestine, she lives and works in Paris. She is a feminist theorist and artist in contemporary New European Painting who invented the concepts of the matrixial space and matrixial gaze and related concepts around trauma, aesthetics and ethics. Ettinger is a professor at...

François Dosse is a French historian and philosopher who specializes in intellectual history.

Christian Bouchet is a French far-right journalist and politician.

Henri Atlan is a French biophysicist and philosopher.

Françoise Combes is a French astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and a professor at the Collège de France where she has been the chair of Galaxies and cosmology since 2014.

Xavier Leroy is a French computer scientist and programmer. He is best known for his role as a primary developer of the OCaml system. He is Professor of software science at Collège de France. Before his appointment at Collège de France in 2018, he was senior scientist (directeur de recherche) at the French government research institution Inria.

Marie-Josèphe Bonnet is a French specialist in the history of women, history of art, and history of lesbians. She has also published books in the history of the French resistance and occupation.

Moritz Schularick [shoo-LAH-rick] is a German economist who has been serving as President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy since 2023.

Jean-Pierre Luminet is a French astrophysicist, specializing in black holes and cosmology. He is an emeritus research director at the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). Luminet is a member of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and Laboratoire Univers et Théories (LUTH) of the Paris-Meudon Observatory, and is a visiting scientist at the Centre de Physique Théorique (CPT)...

Philippe Aigrain was a French computer scientist, activist and researcher.

Jean Claude Ameisen is a French doctor, immunologist and researcher in biology. He is Director of the Center for Life Studies of the Paris Institute of Humanities, Paris Diderot University and President of the National Consultative Ethics Committee (2012–2016).

Catherine Cusset is a best-selling French novelist and the author of Life of David Hockney: A Novel (Other Press, 2019), The Story of Jane (Simon & Schuster, 2001), and 12 other novels published by Éditions Gallimard between 1990 and 2018. Some of her novels (Jouir, La Haine de la famille, Confessions d'un radine, and New York, Journal d’un cycle) are...

Anne Ancelin Schützenberger was a French psychologist and psychotherapist. During the Second World War she was a member of the French Resistance.

Djene Kaba Condé served as the first lady of Guinea from 2010 until her husband Alpha Condé's overthrow during the 2021 Guinean coup d'état. She had three children.

Miguel Benasayag is an Argentine philosopher, psychoanalyst, epistemology researcher and former Guévariste resistance fighter. He is close to the left-libertarian movement.

Gilles I. Pisier is a professor of mathematics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a distinguished professor and A.G. and M.E. Owen Chair of Mathematics at the Texas A&M University. He is known for his contributions to several fields of mathematics, including functional analysis, probability theory, harmonic analysis, and operator theory. He has also made fundamental contributions to...

Péter Frankl is a mathematician, street performer, columnist and educator, active in Japan. Frankl studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and submitted his PhD thesis while still an undergraduate. He holds a PhD degree from the University Paris Diderot as well. He has lived in Japan since 1988, where he is a well-known personality and often appears in...

Serge Venturini is a French poet. Poet of devenir ("destiny"), several metamorphoses run through his poetry. From his poetics of human destiny, through post-human and transhuman poetics, he came to the transvisible thematic.

François Jullien is a French philosopher, Hellenist, and sinologist.

Jean-Michel Cohen is a French nutritionist and author, best known for the Parisian Diet.

Michel Broué is a French mathematician. He holds a chair at Paris Diderot University. Broué has made contributions to algebraic geometry and representation theory.

Laurence Gayte is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as a member of the National Assembly of France since 2017, where she represents the 3rd constituency of the Pyrénées-Orientales.

Malek Chebel was a notable Algerian philosopher and anthropologist of religions. He was one of the most prominent North African intellectuals. He studied in Algeria, then later in France at Paris where he also studied psychoanalysis. He was a teacher at many universities worldwide.

Anne Cheng is a French Sinologist who teaches at the Collège de France and specializes in Chinese history and the history of Chinese philosophy. Pablo Ariel Blitstein, the author of "A new debate about alterity," describes her as an "important representative of French sinology".

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer, one of the "New Philosophers" who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of his work has been devoted to critiques of French society and culture.

Claudie Haigneré is a French doctor, former politician and retired astronaut. The first female astronaut of the French Space Agency (CNES) and the European Space Agency (ESA) to go to space and to visit the ISS, she later was a government minister under Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

Michel Christian Alain Aupetit is a French prelate of the Catholic Church who was Archbishop of Paris from 2018 to 2021, when he resigned following reports of a relationship with a woman in 2012.

Delphine Batho is a French politician of Ecology Generation who has been serving as member of the National Assembly. She is a former Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy. As a candidate in the 2021 ecologist primary, she came in third place with 22.32% of the vote, advocating degrowth. She was re-elected as a member of parliament in the...

Hervé Le Tellier is a French writer and linguist, and a member of the international literary group Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, which translates roughly as "workshop of potential literature"). He is its fourth president. Other notable members have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, Jean Lescure and Harry Mathews. He won the 2020 Prix Goncourt for...

Marie Darrieussecq is a French writer. She is also a translator, and has practised as a psychoanalyst.

Hüseyin Ali Nesin is a Turkish Prof. Mathematician and scientist He was born in November 18 1956 in İstanbul. His father is the well known writer Aziz Nesin, and his mother is Meral Çelen.

Koudou Laurent Gbagbo is an Ivorian politician who was the president of Côte d'Ivoire from 2000 until his arrest in April 2011. He was the first president in the history of the country that was a centre-left politician. A historian, Gbagbo was imprisoned in the early 1970s and again in the early 1990s, and he lived in exile in France...

Axel Kahn was a French geneticist. He was the brother of the journalist Jean-François Kahn and the chemist Olivier Kahn. He was a member of the French National Consultative Ethics Committee from 1992 to 2004 and worked in gene therapy. He first entered the INSERM with a specialization in biochemistry. He was named in 2002 as a counsellor for biosciences...

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.

Sibeth Ndiaye is a French-Senegalese communications advisor who served as Spokesperson of the Government under Prime Minister Édouard Philippe from 1 April 2019 to 6 July 2020.

Alexis Corbière is a French politician. He has been member of the National Assembly for the 7th constituency of the Seine-Saint-Denis department since 2017. Corbière was also a spokesperson for La France Insoumise and the party's leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2017 French presidential election, before falling out of favor with party leadership prior to the snap 2024 legislative election,...

Alain Ehrenberg is a French sociologist, known for his major work on clinical depression, The Weariness of the Self. His work focuses on the culture of individualism in modern times, and its relationship to mental health. As of 2023 he is research director at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.

Jean-Christophe Cambadélis is a French politician of the Socialist Party (PS) who served as the party's First Secretary from April 2014 to June 2017. He was a member of the National Assembly of France, representing the city of Paris, as a member of the Socialist, Republican & Citizen.

Alain Gresh is a French communist party leader and journalist.

Benjamin Stora is a French historian, expert on North Africa, who is widely considered one of the world's leading authorities on Algerian history. He was born in a Jewish family that left the country following its War of Independence in 1962. Stora holds two PhDs (1974 and 1984) and a Doctorate of the State (1991).

Alain Bui is a French academic who is specialized in information technology, and is the current president of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University.

Gérard Philippe Berry is a French computer scientist, member of the French Academy of Sciences (Académie des sciences), French Academy of Technologies (Académie des technologies), and Academia Europaea. He was the Chief Scientist Officer of Esterel Technologies from 2000 to 2009. He held the 2007-2008 yearly Liliane Bettencourt chair of Technological Innovation at the Collège de France. He was Director...

Jacques Lévy is a professor of geography and urbanism at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He is the director of Chôros Laboratory and of the Doctoral Program in Architecture and Science of the City. He is the cofounder of the scientific journal EspacesTemps.net ( ISSN 1777-5477). He published in French,...

Lilith Verstrynge Revuelta is a Spanish former politician. The daughter of Jorge Verstrynge, with whom she shared membership of Podemos, she served in the Congress of Deputies for six months up to January 2024, and was Secretary of State for the 2030 Agenda from July 2022 to November 2023.

Marie-Hélène Lafon is a French educator and award-winning writer.

Marie de Hennezel is a French psychologist, psychotherapist and writer. She is known for her commitment to improving conditions at the end of life. Her books, her two reports to the government, and her speeches on the subject have contributed to the evolution of the image of aging and old age in society.

Cécile Duflot is a French non-governmental organisation (NGO) leader and former politician. She has been a government minister, a member of the National Assembly, and political party leader.

Verónika Fanny Mendoza Frisch is a Peruvian-French psychologist, educator, and politician. She is the founder and current leader of the New Peru movement.