Announcing the Neilson Professorship for Spring 2027

Published May 27, 2026

Smith College is pleased to announce the Neilson Professorship for Spring 2027, sponsored by Christophe Golé, professor of mathematical sciences, and hosted by the Department of Mathematical Sciences, with support from the Departments of Biological Sciences, Physics, and Philosophy.

Our community can look forward to a first for the Neilson Professorship—a shared residency with a husband-and-wife team, Annemiek Cornelissen and Stephane Duoady. Both hold tenured positions at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and work with the Learning Planet Institute in Paris (formerly the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity).

We look forward to welcoming our 2026–27 Neilson Professors and to the conversations their visits will inspire. Please watch for announcements of public lectures, workshops, and other opportunities to engage with their work in spring 2027.

Annemiek Cornelissen

Annemiek Cornelissen, a mechanical engineer trained at Delft University of Technology, studies branching vascular networks across living and nonliving systems. Branched structures constitute a distinct class of shapes that occur frequently in nature across many spatial and dynamical scales. They can form in trees, blood vessels, lungs, river deltas, snowflakes, lightning, leaf veins, and cracks, and can do so almost instantaneously or over long timescales, such as evolutionary or geological time. She is interested in the analogies between the morphogenesis of network patterns in dead matter and those in living tissues. What common physical rules govern these patterns? What mechanisms drive the transition from branching to looping networks? From this perspective, she studies the canal network of the jellyfish’s gastrovascular system.

Stéphane Douady

Stéphane Douady trained as a physicist but fell in love with plants and morphogenesis after a chance encounter with a Romanesco broccoli and the problem of phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves in plants). Morphogenesis led him to tropical forests and deserts, where he deciphered not only shapes but also the song of the dunes. He has a long-standing interest in philosophy and religion (mysticism) and has participated in two art residencies with his wife. A visit to Bodh Gaya and observations of leaves sold as pilgrimage memorabilia led him to study the formation of reticulated patterns, from the veins in leaves and jellyfish to the cracks in city streets.