Antoine Petit was appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the CNRS on January 24, 2018 by the President of the French Republic on the proposal of Frédérique Vidal, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation..
A university professor of exceptional calibre, Antoine Petit has been President of Inria since October 2014. He has been non-executive president of the IHEST (Institut des hautes études pour la science et la technologie) since last April.
Antoine Petit was born on 18 June 1960 in Levallois-Perret. He obtained his agrégation in Mathematics in 1982, and defended a thesis in Computer Science at the University of Paris-Diderot in 1985. First assistant lecturer at the University of Orléans, then lecturer at the University of Paris-Sud, he was first seconded to the CNRS in 1991 as a research fellow at the Computer Science Research Laboratory (CNRS/University of Paris-Sud).
In 1994, he was appointed Professor of Universities at ENS Cachan. The following year, he became the director of the Computer Science Department at ENS Cachan.
He then joined the Ministry in charge of Research in November 2001 as Deputy Director in the Research Directorate, responsible for the Mathematics and Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies sector. That same year, he was elected member of the National Committee for Scientific Research (Information Science and Technology section).
At the very beginning of 2004, Antoine Petit returned to the CNRS, first as Scientific Director of the Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies Department, then as Inter-regional Director for the South-West region.
In August 2006, he was seconded to Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, as director of the Paris-Rocquencourt research centre. In September 2010, he was appointed Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the organization, then its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer in October 2014.
Since April 2017, Antoine Petit has been non-executive president of the IHEST, the Graduate Institute for Science and Technology. He is also a member of the National Council of Industry, the Scientific Council of the Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technical Choices (Opecst) and Onera's High Scientific Council.
Antoine Petit is Knight of the Legion of Honour and Officer of the National Order of Merit.
