Professor Emmanuel Didier

Emmanuel Didier is a sociologist, a full professor (directeur de recherche CNRS) at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (École Normale Supérieure, Paris) and a member of the Center for the Study of Invention and Social Process (Goldsmiths University of London). He taught at the University of Chicago and at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and now teaches at Ecole Normale Supérieure and Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique (ENSAE Paris) He is a member of the French National Advisory Council on Ethics. Originally trained as a statistician (ENSAE Paris), Emmanuel Didier very soon specialized in the study of statistics as a tool of government.

He published several books, among which is America by the Numbers. Quantification, Democracy and the Birth of National Statistics, which bore on the relationship between the invention of random sampling in the US and State interventionism and State planning during the New Deal, and Statactivisme, an edited volume (with Isabelle Bruno and Julien Prévieux), dedicated to analyze ways in which ordinary people use statistics to enhance their power against institutions. Recently he has been working on the topic of big data in the domain of health and medicine. He heads the Institut Santé Numérique en Société (www.isns.fr) in Paris and was a reporter for two opinions of the French National Advisory Council on Ethics in association with the French Advisory Council on Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.