Eurographics is very pleased to award the Eurographics Medal 2025 to Marie-Paule Cani for her outstanding research contributions, for her role in developing computer graphics in France and Europe, and for her impact and leadership in the field at large.
Marie-Paule Cani is a Professor of Computer Science at Ecole Polytechnique, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. She received her B.Sc. from Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), and her Ph.D. from University Paris XI (Orsay) in 1990. In 1991 she became an Assistant Professor at ENS, before joining l’Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble in 1993 where she became Professor in 1997. In 2017 she moved back to Paris as professor at Ecole Polytechnique.
Marie-Paule has been recognized for her research contributions in Shape Modeling and Computer Animation. Early in her career she made fundamental contributions to implicit surface modeling, and in a series of highly influential papers she addressed contact modeling, collision detection, and animation of highly deformable bodies. These papers have become classics, and they pioneered the use of implicit representations in a variety of applications, particular in animation and the simulation of natural phenomena. Building on this previous work, her research on Creative 3D Modeling and Animation aims at intelligent systems that help users express the shapes in motion they have in mind, and to organize them into complex virtual worlds. She is currently applying this to support research in other scientific domains, such as in the field of prehistory.
Marie-Paule Cani is a recognized scientific leader, and she has demonstrated strong leadership in the computer graphics community, both at Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH. She is one of the most globally visible European graphics researchers.
She was vice president (2013-2016) and president (2017-2018) of Eurographics, a director at large in the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee (2007-2011), and a member of the ACM Publication Board (2011-2014). She served as technical paper chair of SIGGRAPH 2017 and was on the editorial boards of ACM TOG, Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE TVCG, Graphical Models, and Computers & Graphics. Marie-Paule’s contributions have been prominently recognized by the community, and she has been highly decorated with the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award (2011), a CNRS silver medal (2012), an ERC Advanced Grant (2012), her election to the Academia Europaea (2013), to the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy (2019), and to the French Academy of Science (2020), the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award (2022), and the ACM SIGGRAPH Seven A. Coons Award (2023).
Please join us in congratulating Marie-Paule for an outstanding career in computer graphics and on being awarded the Eurographics Medal 2025.