Sylvie Retailleau, a graduate of Cachan became Minister for Higher Education, Research and Innovation
Here is a look back at her exceptional career since her years as a student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
His career
After a preparatory class at the Dumont D'Urville high school in Toulon, Sylvie entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (now ENS Paris-Saclay) in the EEA department (Electricity, Electrotechnics and Automatics) and obtained the Aggregation of Physical Sciences, option "Applied Physics" in 1988.
As a physicist specialised in the field of components for advanced electronics (microelectronics, nanoelectronics and quantum), she defended her thesis "Study of the Si/SiGe/Si double heterojunction bipolar transistor by Monte-Carlo simulations", in 1992 at the University of Paris-Sud under the supervision of René Castagné.
The same year she became a lecturer at the University of Paris-Sud and then in 2001 a university professor.
She developed her research at the Institut d'Électronique Fondamentale (UMR CNRS Université Paris-Sud), a laboratory which, on 1 June 2016, merged with the Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures (LPN) to become the C2N (Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies - CNRS/Université Paris-Sud), a world-class laboratory in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology.
Dean of the Faculty of Sciences from September 2011 to May 2016, she was President of the University of Paris-Sud from May 2016 to December 2018, then President of the COMUE Université Paris-Saclay.
Sylvie Retailleau was elected President of the Université Paris-Saclay on 2 March 2020, of which ENS Paris-Saclay is a co-founder. As such, since that date she has been an ex-officio member of the Board of Directors of ENS Paris-Saclay, after having sat on the Board from 2016 to 2019 as a representative of partner institutions and having sat on the Scientific Council from 2010 to 2016.
On 20 May 2022, she was appointed as Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation in the government of Élisabeth Borne.
Graduate of ENS Paris-Saclay
Science en Une(s), a video series on women at ENS Paris-Saclay
Sylvie Retailleau has accepted to testify, as an alumnus of the School, in a series of videos honouring women who study or work, have studied or worked at ENS Paris-Saclay. They talk about their career path, their projects, their motivations and share their vision of the place of women in science, today and in the future.