Mathilde Rousseau, winner of the CNRS Crystal Medal
What alternatives to large IT tools are being developed at the local level? Who is raising awareness among research teams about digital sovereignty issues? Mathilde Rousseau is IT manager and systems and network administrator at the Laboratoire de Mathématiques d’Orsay. Her collaborative and essential work has now been recognized with the CNRS 2025 Crystal Medal.
A statistician by training, Mathilde Rousseau began working in IT somewhat by chance in 1993. She quickly became hooked: she enjoys discovering new concepts and working on technologies that are constantly evolving.
With a master's degree in stochastic modeling and statistics, Mathilde Rousseau began her career at the Centre de Ressources Informatiques. This first experience was the starting point for an exciting and varied career. A member of the Laboratoire de Mathématiques d'Orsay1 since 2015, she is currently head of the IT department and systems and network administrator.
Mathilde Rousseau raises awareness among the laboratory teams about digital sovereignty issues and helps them to develop their everyday practices. “We meet the department's needs by providing its members with computing resources and digital tools developed in-house or shared with our supervisory bodies, as alternatives to those offered by Google, Microsoft, or Amazon,” she explains.
In March 2020, during the first lockdown, the IT specialist worked with colleagues from the Laurent Schwartz Mathematics Center2 and the Computer Science Research Laboratory3 to deploy a web conferencing server for her laboratory. She then opened a second server, accessible to the entire community through the m4th portal.
Mathilde Rousseau is a member of the management committee of the mathematics department and collaborates on projects outside the laboratory. She was the technical advisor for the development of the CNRS mission management portal Etamine and for the mathematics portal for Artificial Intelligence in the Île-de-France region.