Mireille Bousquet-Mélou

Education and career

Bousquet-Mélou was born in Albi, the second daughter of two high school teachers, and grew up in Pau where her family moved when she was three. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1986 to 1990, as the only woman in her entering class of mathematicians, and earned an agrégation in mathematics in 1989, with Xavier Gérard Viennot as her mentor in combinatorics. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Bordeaux in 1991, with a dissertation on the enumeration of orthogonally convex polyominos supervised by Viennot. She joined CNRS as a junior researcher in 1990, and completed a habilitation at Bordeaux in 1996.