Rima Alaifari is Assistant Professor in Applied Mathematics at l’ETH Zurich. Her research interests lie mainly in the areas of applied analytics, inverse problems and scientific machine learning. Her research interests include stability analysis and regularisation of inverse problems, applied harmonic analysis, phase recovery and stability aspects of machine learning, in particular operator learning. She is an associate member of the ETH AI Center.

Her academic career began with studies in applied and industrial mathematics at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, where she obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees between 2005 and 2010. She then continued with a PhD in mathematics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel from 2010 to 2014, under the supervision of Professors Ingrid Daubechies (see below) and Michel Defrise.

After her PhD, her post-doctoral career continued at ETH Zurich. Since October 2016, she has held the position of Assistant Professor in Applied Mathematics at ETH Zurich, where she continues to develop her research at the intersection of applied mathematics and artificial intelligence. From September 2025, she will be Professor at the UNiversity of Aachen in Germany.

Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian mathematician with American citizenship, famous for her groundbreaking work on wavelets and image compression.

After obtaining her doctorate in physics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1980, she pursued a post-doctoral career in the United States before returning to teach theoretical physics at her home university. Her initial research focused on quantum physics operators. In 1987, she settled permanently in the United States, first working at Bell Laboratories and then, in 1994, becoming the first woman professor of mathematics at Princeton University.

Renowned for her innovative mathematical methods improving image compression technologies, Daubechies is a member of prestigious institutions such as the National Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her scientific excellence earned her a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. Between 2011 and 2013, she was a member of the jury for the Infosys Prize for Mathematical Sciences, before joining the Academia Europaea in 2015.

Strongly committed to promoting diversity, Daubechies sits on the steering committee of Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education, a programme supporting women pursuing postgraduate studies in mathematics. Between 2011 and 2014, she made history by becoming the first female president of the International Mathematical Union.

The following video was made in 2023 when she was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize.

The second video is longer. It is a video of an interview at CIRM (Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques) in Marseille.