Bouchaud, Élisabeth, 1961-

Elisabeth Bouchaud (born Tibi) is a French physicist, playwright and actress born 1 March 1961. She is a former member of Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA), and of Ecole Superieure de Chimie et Physique de la Ville de Paris. Since 2014, she is also the Director of the Théâtre de la Reine Blanche in Paris. In 2019, she opened a theatre in Avignon. That same year, she also created a drama school, with fr:Florient Azoulay and fr:Xavier Gallais In physics, she has worked in quantitative fractography, establishing some universal fractal properties of fracture surfaces, a subject pioneered by Benoit Mandelbrot. In fact, the term "fractal" itself was coined by Mandelbrot in 1975, based on the Latin frāctus meaning "broken" or "fractured". Elisabeth Bouchaud suggested that these fractal properties could be understood in terms of the propagation of the crack front in a disordered environment, which is affected by the vicinity of a depinning transition. She was awarded the Louis Ancel Prize, the Onsager Medal, and the Aniuta Winter-Klein Prize. In 2025, for her work at La Reine Blanche, she was awarded the Jean Perrin Prize of Honour. She was also named one of the 100 Women of Culture of the Year 2025.