Speaker — Neptune Forum 2026
Antoine Petit
Président-Directeur général, CNRS
President, CNRS
Antoine Petit, a professor of exceptional rank at French universities, was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of CNRS on 24 January 2018. Holder of the agrégation in mathematics and a PhD in computer science from Université Paris Diderot, Antoine Petit is a specialist in formal methods, principally based on transition systems, for the specification and verification of real-time parallel systems.
An academic researcher from 1984 to 2004, he served as an agrégé assistant at the University of Orléans, then as a senior lecturer at Université Paris-Sud before becoming a professor at the École normale supérieure de Cachan in 1994. From 2001 to 2003, Antoine Petit was Deputy Director for Research at the Ministry, responsible for Mathematics and Information and Communication Technologies.
In 2004 he was seconded to CNRS, first as Scientific Director of the Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies department, then as Interregional Director for the South-West. In 2006, he joined Inria to lead the Paris-Rocquencourt research centre, before being appointed Deputy Director General. In 2014, he became President and Chief Executive Officer of Inria.
