Aleksandra Walczak, CNRS silver medal

Aleksandra Walczak received her PhD in physics at the University of California, San Diego, working on models of stochastic gene expression. After a graduate fellowship at KITP, she was a Princeton Center for Theoretical Science Fellow, focusing on applying information theory to signal processing. Currently she is a CNRS research director at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, interested in collective behavior, fly development and statistical descriptions of the immune system. She was awarded the "Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand de l'Académie des sciences" in 2014 and the bronze medal of CNRS in 2015. She was awarded the "Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand de l'Académie des sciences" in 2014, the bronze medal of CNRS in 2015, the American Physical Society Fellowship, the Prix Jean Ricard of the French Physics Society in 2021 and the silver medal of CNRS in 2024.

She has contributed to statistical descriptions of immune repertoires and she has a current strong interest in viral-immune co-evolution. She has experience both analysing large high throughput repertoire datasets and developing theoretical approaches that help us understand the design and functioning of adaptive immune repertoires. She is interested in describing the collective dynamical behaviour in living systems, identifying relevant interaction timescales. Inspired by development, she has been working on the constraints that short timescale decision making imposes on regulatory architectures.