The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has announced its 2026-2028 CNRS Fellow-Ambassadors. The work of these ambassadors has redefined the boundaries of contemporary research—from the Turing Award to the Nobel Prize, from immunology to the film history. The new cohort, which includes Gabriele Steidl from TU Berlin, is distinguished by scientific excellence, interdisciplinarity, and a focus on the major strategic challenges of the 21st century: artificial intelligence, health, high-performance computing, climate, energy, and collective memories.

The CNRS Fellow-Ambassadors program aims to establish the CNRS as a focal point for major international scientific communities. The work of the new fellow ambassadors covers fields as diverse as high-performance computing, mathematics, ecology, materials physics, immunology, and film studies. The Fellow-Ambassadors program builds on the tradition of distinguished visiting professorships. The selected researchers are invited through proposals submitted by CNRS departments—in Steidl’s case, CNRS Informatics. Fellows commit to spending approximately one month per year over a three-year period at one or more laboratories in France, where they collaborate closely with local researchers.

Gabriele Steidl—MATH+ Professor of Applied Mathematics at TU Berlin since March 2020—has been selected as one of the Fellows for her research in machine learning and image processing. Commenting on the CNRS Fellow-Ambassador appointment, she said: “It is a great honor for me to be selected as a CNRS Fellow Ambassador. I have been working for a long time with many colleagues in France and will further intensify this cooperation. Beyond Paris, I will visit CNRS in Grenoble this year and participate in the CNRS AI Rising Talents selection process. In the coming years, I intend to spend time at CNRS centers in Lille, Lyon, Sophie Antipolis, and Bordeaux, and perhaps at one of the CNRS laboratories in Singapore or Japan.”

Gabriele Steidl conducts research at the interface of mathematics and computer science. More specifically, her work focuses on image processing, machine learning, optimal transport, optimization, and applied and computational harmonic analysis.

She received her PhD and habilitation in mathematics from Universität Rostock in 1988 and 1992, respectively. From 1993 to 1996, Steidl was an assistant professor at Technische Universität Darmstadt before she was appointed professor at the Universität Mannheim (1996–2011) and later at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (2011–2020).

Further, Steidl worked as a consultant at the Verband Deutscher Rentenversicherungsträger Frankfurt am Main (1992–1993) and as an advisor at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at universities in Debrecen (Hungary) and Zürich and a visiting professor at several universities, including the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Cachan, the University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, and Sorbonne Université in Paris. Since 2020, Gabriele Steidl has been a member of the DFG Fachkollegium in Mathematics and has served as Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences. In 2022, she was also elected a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for her contributions.

Since March 2020, Steidl has been a MATH+ Professor at TU Berlin. She also serves as a member of the MATH+ Board. Currently, she heads the MATH+ project “Exploding Velocity Fields in Generative Neural Flows: Analysis and Circumvention” within the Emerging Field “Learning-informed Optimization.”

LINKS:

• CNRS announcement of CNRS Fellow-Ambassadors 2026-2028
• Gabriele Steidl’s Personal homepage