Ingrid Daubechies Awarded National Medal of Science

It is the highest recognition the nation can bestow on scientists and engineers

Ingrid Daubechies
Mathematician Ingrid Daubechies will receive the National Medal of Science, the highest possible recognition bestowed on scientists and engineers in the nation.

President Joe Biden has announced that Ingrid Daubechies, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics, will receive the National Medal of Science in 2025. She is being honored for her pioneering work on signal processing.

Established by the U.S. Congress in 1959, the National Medal of Science is the highest possible recognition bestowed on scientists and engineers in the nation. Each year, a committee of distinguished scientists and engineers is appointed by the president of the United States to evaluate nominees from areas as diverse as astronomy, chemistry, computer and information science, engineering, geoscience, materials research, and research on STEM education.

“Ingrid Daubechies is a singular figure in her field, and we congratulate her on this recognition of her profound impact on science and technology,” said Duke Provost Alec D. Gallimore. “Her distinguished career has demonstrated the enormous potential of academic research and the transformative power of interdisciplinary thinking.”

Nicknamed “The Godmother of the Digital Image” by The New York Times, Daubechies’ research on wavelet theory — a refinement of the Fourier technique — underlies much of today’s image processing technologies, including image compression and denoising. Anytime you go to a movie theater, each frame has been compressed using Daubechies’ wavelet-based method.

“Ingrid invented a really elegant way of storing the important information within images that preserves edges and allows compression, but also allows almost perfect reconstruction of the image, even from highly compressed versions of it,” said Cynthia Rudin, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science.

Honors for Rubenstein, Johnson, Smeal and Kaufman

President Joe Biden also announced that Duke alumnus and former trustee chair David Rubenstein will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Kristina Johnson, the former dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

In addition, Duke alumni Eleanor Smeal and Ted Kaufman received the Presidential Citizens Medal.

The Medal of Freedom is the country’s highest civilian honor. Rubenstein and 18 others will be presented the award in a White House ceremony on Saturday.

A University Medal winner, Rubenstein, T’70, has made a mark at Duke and across the country with his philanthropy. He has supported the restoration of historic landmarks and cultural institutions, including the Kennedy Center and Monticello.

Johnson, a pioneer in applications of liquid crystals, including micro displays for high-definition projection television, served as Pratt dean from 1999 to 2007. She left Duke to become provost of Johns Hopkins University and has also served as chancellor of the State University of New York and president of Ohio State University.

Women’s rights activist Eleanor Smeal, ’61, is the former president of the National Organization for Women. She received a Duke honorary degree in 1991.

Ted Kaufman, E ’60, was honored for his national service, including as U.S. senator from Delaware. Kaufman taught classes at Duke in law, public policy and business. He served as co-chair of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Congress from 1995-99.

The elegance of Daubechies’ technique comes from the mathematics derivation of wavelets. “The derivation boosted Ingrid into legendary status among the mathematical world as well as among electrical engineers,” said Rudin, who also holds appointments in Statistical Sciences, Mathematics, Electrical and Computing Engineering, and Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.

Armed with her elegant math and unwavering curiosity, Daubechies spent much of her career defying disciplinary boundaries, weaving in and out of fields as disparate as art restoration and evolutionary biology.

“We join so many in congratulating Ingrid on this thrilling recognition of her life’s work and the far-reaching impact of her research, scholarship and mentorship,” said Gary Bennett, dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. “Beyond her historic findings in the fields of mathematics and engineering, Ingrid is a tireless advocate for increasing the number of women in the sciences. We’re beyond proud of what she has accomplished and how she is changing Duke and the world for the better.”

Her early work helped the FBI squeeze down millions of fingerprints in 1990s computers. She has worked with geologists to peek under the Earth’s crust, analyzing seismograms from earthquakes. She has partnered as with neuroscientists and cardiologists, reading MRI images of brain activity and patterns in electrocardiograms.

Using one of her techniques to compare 3D shapes, Daubechies has worked with fossil experts, analyzing scans of bones and teeth to learn about an extinct animal’s diet or locomotion patterns. In a completely different kind of museum, Daubechies and her team used wavelets and machine learning to distinguish forgeries from true works by Vincent van Gogh. The ensuing collaboration between mathematicians, computer scientists, museum curators and art historians has led to algorithms used to date and mathematically restore artwork that has cracked, faded, or been reduced to rubble by wartime bombing.

“I really get a lot of joy out of seeing creativity at work in any field; it doesn’t have to be a scientific field,” said Daubechies in an interview with the Simon’s Foundation Flatiron Institute.

Born in Houthalen, Belgium, Daubechies studied theoretical physics at the Vrije Universiteit, in Brussels, the same institution where she completed a doctorate in quantum physics in 1980. In the United States, she conducted research at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey before joining Princeton University’s faculty in 1993, where she became the first woman to be a tenured professor in mathematics.

This was only one of many “firsts” in Daubechies’ career. In 2000, she was the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics. A decade later, she was the first woman elected president of the International Mathematical Union. In 2018, she was the first female recipient of the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics. She is a 1992 MacArthur Fellow, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard University and the L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science award. She received the 2023 Wolf Prize in Mathematics, and, in 2024, was elected to the Royal Society of London

Rather than boasting about such achievements, Daubechies has worked hard to help make the concept of “first female to” a thing of the past, advocating tirelessly to break gender barriers in STEM. “I feel successful being part of a bigger whole,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s such a man thing to want your effigy. That may be a reason why women have been so forgotten.”

Daubechies, along with the other 13 National Medal of Science awardees, received the medal from the president Jan. 3 during a ceremony at the White House.

At Duke, she will join Robert Lefkowitz, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Medicine, who was presented with the National Medal of Science in 2008, as a recipient of this prestigious honor.

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