Audrey Dussutour is a Research Director at CNRS, specializing in the study of ant behavior and unicellular organisms. Her research focuses on distributed intelligence mechanisms, investigating how social insects and non-neuronal organisms process information and solve problems collectively without centralized control. She has received several distinctions for her work and was elected an associate member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium in 2023.
She has led two major citizen science projects. The first, "Raise Your Blob", conducted in partnership with CNES and CNRS, engaged more than 5,000 educational institutions and 350,000 students in studying blob behavior in microgravity aboard the ISS. The second, "Behind the Blob, Research", brought together 15,000 volunteers to analyze the effects of climate change on blob survival and growth.
She is the author of several popular science books, including Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Blob, Without Ever Daring to Ask (2017, Équateurs, Science for All Prize), The Odyssey of Ants (2022, Grasset), Me, the Blob(2022, Humensciences, Taste of Science Prize 2023, Science Book Prize 2024), and The Apocalypse fungi (2025, Grasset). Since 2025, she has also been directing a book collection on animal behavior, Wild Chronicles, at TANA Editions.
Dedicated to scientific outreach, she was awarded the first CNRS Mediation Medal in 2021 and the National Order of Merit for her public engagement initiatives.