Josianne Zerubia named IEEE Life Fellow

The IEEE recently named Josiane Zerubia Life Fellow, one of the organization’s most valuable distinctions. This recognition honors more than thirty years of continuous involvement in the international signal and image processing community.                  

Josiane Zerubia joined Inria in 1989, initially working with the Pastis team on stochastic models and spatial imaging, before taking charge of several research teams, including Ariana for over thirteen years. Throughout her career, she has also contributed to long-term international collaborations and given numerous seminars as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.

Josiane Zerubia has already received several major distinctions: she has been an IEEE Fellow since 2003, a Fellow of Eurasip since 2019, and a Fellow of IAPR since 2020. She has also been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Szeged.

Nomination as a Life Fellow is based on three criteria: Being older than 65 years old, reaching a combined age and membership duration of over one hundred years and having maintained regular activity within IEEE structures.. In her case, this activity has taken the form of organizing conferences, participating in the IEEE Awards Committee, serving as an editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and being involved in the Women in Signal Processing committee.

Since her early days, her work has focused on satellite imaging and probabilistic models, with a constant interest in methods for leveraging new generations of sensors. She is currently participating in a CNES–Inria challenge dedicated to foundation models for large-scale analysis of optical data, from the first Spot satellites to the CO3D constellation.

For her, this appointment recognizes a career spanning several decades in a rapidly evolving field: sensor resolution, computing power, and the advent of large-scale learning approaches. Despite these changes, she stresses the importance of maintaining a strong link with the mathematical foundations that still structure signal and image processing today.