Université Paris-Saclay researchers Anne Moreau and Ana Maria Gómez honoured by the Académie des Sciences in 2025
On Tuesday 25 November, the Académie des Sciences announced the recipients of its 2025 awards, recognising two researchers from Université Paris-Saclay: Anne Moreau and Ana Maria Gómez.
Section Medal
Anne Moreau, professor at Université Paris-Saclay, director of the Jacques Hadamard Library of the Mathematics Department in Orsay, and Editor-in-Chief of the Panoramas & Synthèses series, received the Section Medal for her particularly promising research work. A researcher at the Laboratoire de mathématiques d’Orsay (LMO - Univ. Paris-Saclay/CNRS), Anne Moreau conducts research at the interface between representation theory and algebraic geometry, with early results focusing on Lie group theory. She subsequently explored arc spaces and the motivic invariants of spherical varieties. Anne Moreau is currently studying vertex algebras, notably W-algebras, through their associated varieties, motivated by conformal field theory in physics.
The Section Medal recognises a scientist in active service working in a French laboratory (either located on national territory or an international laboratory belonging to a French institution), whether public or private, who has contributed to the development of their discipline through particularly promising results, with no restriction regarding the fundamental or applied nature of their research.
Lamonica Prize in Cardiology
Ana Maria Gómez, director of research at Inserm and head of the laboratoire Signalisation et physiopathologie cardiovasculaire (Carpat - Univ. Paris-Saclay/Inserm), has been awarded the Lamonica Prize in Cardiology. Her work focuses on the mechanisms that regulate the heartbeat under both normal and pathological conditions. She studies the ryanodine receptor, a key calcium channel, to understand how its dysfunction contributes to the loss of contractile strength in heart failure and to the development of arrhythmias that can lead to sudden death.
The Lamonica Prize in Cardiology (Fondation pour la recherche biomédicale - P.C.L), worth €75,000, is an annual award in cardiovascular research granted to a scientist working in a French laboratory. An amount of €15,000 is awarded directly to the laureate, while the remaining €60,000 contributes to funding a research fellowship.
On 20 November, Ana Maria Gómez was also awarded the Danièle Hermann-Cœur de Femmes fellowship for her research project aimed at understanding why women, at equivalent age and cardiac condition, show a greater susceptibility than men to certain arrhythmias, particularly in situations of acute stress.
Together with her team, she studies RyR2, the ion channel that regulates cardiac contractions, combining animal models and human cells derived from stem cells to explore how sex influences the heart’s electrical activity. The first results show that the female heart responds differently to stress, and that certain RyR2 abnormalities alter sex-related differences in heart rhythm, thereby highlighting women’s increased vulnerability to specific arrhythmias.