Ingrid Daubechies Earns Global Recognition as 2025 Citation Laureate

Ingrid Daubechies, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics, was honored Thursday, Sept. 25, as a 2025 Citation Laureate, a global recognition of research excellence presented by Clarivate Plc. 

Daubechies, who received the National Medal of Science earlier this year, is among 22 researchers worldwide to be recognized by Clarivate, a global provider of transformative intelligence, with the honor this year. Since the program’s inception, 83 Citation Laureates have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes. 

Daubechies offered words of thanks for the honor, noting the importance within academic communities to celebrate the accomplishments of the members. She said the Department of Mathematics is filled with colleagues who are collaborative, inclusive and supportive. “I have been at other departments in a number of universities, and the math department here really stole my heart,” she said.

Representatives from Clarivate presented the award to Daubechies during a ceremony in Gross Hall, where Daubechies was joined by her departmental colleagues and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences leaders. Experts at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate select the Citation Laureates each year. The program highlights researchers whose foundational papers are among the most highly cited in their fields, reflecting broad influence across disciplines and borders, and whose work is considered to be of Nobel-class.

Smita Krishnan, vice president for product management, research and analytics with Clarivate, shared with those gathered for the award presentation the scope and impact of Daubechies’s work, noting that it has been applied in areas including media, telecommunications, medical imaging, cybersecurity and more. Her research is highly cited, with three papers garnering more than 2,000 citations each, putting her among the top tier of researchers in terms of the breadth of their impact upon the field. 

“Being named a Citation Laureate is a mark of global recognition of research excellence that highlights work that is highly respected by peers as well as the global research community,” Krishnan said. 

Daubechies was honored alongside colleagues Stéphane Mallat of Collège de France and Yves Meyer of École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay “for advancing wavelet theory, a revolution in mathematics and physics with practical applications including image processing.” 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. She joined the Duke faculty in 2011 as the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and later served as the first female president of the International Mathematical Union. 

Trinity Dean of Natural Sciences Amy Herring shared with the crowd that Daubechies’s impact goes beyond her discoveries and research in mathematics and engineering. “I’d also like to mention her tireless work in the name of equity, the countless ways that she’s advocated for an increase in the number of women in the sciences,” Herring said. “What brought us together today is the exemplary record of scholarship Ingrid has compiled in her amazing career, the impact she has had on science and our daily lives, and the influence that she will continue to have on generations of scholars. But what makes her very truly remarkable is the friend, the mentor and the visionary she has been and continues to be to those who have the honor of knowing her.”

In 2000, she became 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.

Professor Johnathan Mattingly shared that Daubechies was a member of his doctoral thesis defense committee, and she has been a model for how to use kindness to overcome the big egos one may encounter. “And I deeply appreciated the idea she had that you should just chase whatever problems are most interesting to you,” Mattingly said. “She said to me that whenever there’s a good problem, there’s always good mathematics inside that problem, and so if you find a good problem, you should just go for it, no matter what.”