World-renowned researchers

CNRS's long tradition of excellence is reinforced by its 17 Nobel laureates and 11 Fields Medal award winners.

A number of eminent researchers have worked, for at least some part of their career, at one of CNRS's many laboratories.

Nobel prize

Jean Perrin, CNRS founder, Nobel prize in Physics, 1926,
Frédéric Joliot-Curie, first director general after WWII, Nobel prize in Chemistry, 1935.

And more recently:

Physics: Alfred Kastler (1966), Louis Néel (1970), Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1991), Georges Charpak (1992), Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (1997), Albert Fert (2007)
Chemistry: Jean-Marie Lehn (1987), Yves Chauvin (2005),
Biology and medicine: André Lwoff, Jacques Monod and François Jacob (1965), Jean Dausset (1980), Luc Montagnier (2008), Jules Hoffman (2011),
Economics: Maurice Allais (1988).

Fields medals

There is no Nobel prize in mathematics, the highest award for outstanding work in the discipline being the Fields medal. CNRS has been home to a number of Fields medal winners:

Laurent Schwartz (1950), Jean-Pierre Serre (1954), René Thom (1958), Alexandre Grothendieck (1966), Alain Connes (1982), Pierre-Louis Lions and Jean-Christophe Yoccoz (1994), Laurent Lafforgue (2002), Wendelin Werner (2006), Ngô Bao Châu and Cédric Villani in 2010.

Turing Award

The Turing Award, often recognized as the "Nobel Prize of computing" is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field".

In 2007, Joseph Sifakis is the first French researcher to have received this award since it was created in 1966.

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