I graduated from "Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Informatique et Mathematiques Appliquees"
(ENSIMAG) in Grenoble,  then got my PhD (1978) and "Doctorat d'Etat" (1984) degrees
both from Paul Sabatier University in  Toulouse (France). I have been at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse
since1980, where I am currently Directeur de Recherche. I am also a member of IMT,
the Institute of Mathematics of Toulouse. I was a one year visitor (1978-79 and 1985-86) at the
Electrical Engineering Dept. of the University of California at Berkeley with a fellowship from
Inria and NSF. I have done several one-month visits to Stanford University (Stanford, , California),
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge), the Mathematical Sciences Research
Institute (MSRI, Berkeley), the Fields Institute (Fields, Toronto), the Institute for Mathematics and its
Applications (IMA, Minneapolis), Cinvestav-IPN (Cinvestav, Mexico), Leiden University (Leiden,
The Netherlands), the Tinbergen Institute (Tinbergen, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), the University
of Adelaide (Adelaide, Australia), the University of South Australia (UniSA, Adelaide), the University
of British Columbia (UBC, Vancouver, Canada). Recipient of the 2009 Lagrange prize in Continuous optimization.