Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (born 1962) is a French physicist. He is co-founder and chairman of Capital Fund Management (CFM), adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure and co-director of the CFM-Polytechnique Chair of Econophysics and Complex Systems at Ecole Polytechnique. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and held the Bettencourt Innovation Chair at Collège de France in 2020. In 2026, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Biography Born in Paris in 1962, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud studied at the French Lycée in London. Graduating from École Normale Supérieure in 1985, he carried out his PhD at the Laboratory of Hertzian Spectroscopy, studying spin-polarized quantum gases with Claire Lhuillier. He then worked for the French National Center for Scientific Research, in particular on liquid Helium 3 and diffusion in random media. He spent a year at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge in 1992 before joining the Laboratory of Condensed Matter Physics (SPEC) of the French Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique or CEA) à Saclay. Pioneer in econophysics, he co-founded the company Science et Finance in 1994, which later merged with Capital Fund Management (CFM) in 2000. He is now the Chairman of CFM. After teaching statistical mechanics for ten years at ESPCI, he was appointed in 2009 as an adjunct Professor at École Polytechnique. He now teaches a course From Statistical Mechanics to Social Sciences at École Normale Supérieure and, for a year, at Collège de France. His work covers the physics of disordered and glassy systems, granular materials, the statistics of price formation, stock market fluctuations and the modelling of financial risks. He has repeatedly criticized the dogma of the efficient-market hypothesis and the methodology of economics and mathematical finance, in particular the use of the Black–Scholes model which leads to a systematic underestimation of risk in options trading.

Awards IBM Young Researcher Prize in 1989 CNRS Silver Medal in 1995 Risk Quant of the Year in 2017 Elected as member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2017. Elected at the chaire Bettencourt de l'innovation at Collège de France in 2020. Quant Researcher of the Year, Journal of Portfolio Management in 2024. Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society in 2025, together with Leticia Cugliandolo and Jorge Kurchan for their work on the dynamics of glassy systems.