A Frenchman among the "Forbes 30 under 30"

Jean-Baptiste Michel holds joint academic appointments at Harvard (FQEB Fellow) and Google (Visiting Faculty). His research focuses on using large volumes of data as tools to help better understand the world around us — from the way diseases progress in patients over years, to the way cultures change in human societies over centuries. With his colleague Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jean-Baptiste is a Founding Director of Harvard’s Cultural Observatory, where their research team has pioneered the use of quantitative methods for the study of human culture, language and history. His research has been featured on the covers of Science and Nature, on the front pages of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, in The Economist, Wired and many other publications. The online tool he helped create — ngrams.googlelabs.com — has been used millions of times to browse cultural trends. Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and he holds an MS in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.

He has been listed by Forbes among the "30 Under 30" Rising Stars of Science. Date: December 19, 2011 (www.forbes.com).