Antoine Petit, an exceptional grade university professor, was appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the CNRS on January 24, 2018. After earning a teaching degree and a PhD in computer science from the Université Paris Diderot, he specialized in formal methods, mostly based on transition systems, for the specification and verification of parallel systems in real time. An academic from 1984 to 2004, he served as an assistant professor at the Université d'Orléans, a lecturer at the Université Paris-Sud and a professor at the ENS Cachan (near Paris) from 1994.

From 2001 to 2003, Antoine Petit was deputy director of the French Research Ministry's Research Department, in charge of Mathematics and Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies. In 2004, he was seconded to the CNRS, first as scientific director of the Information and Communication Science and Technologies Department, before becoming inter-regional director for South West France. In 2006, he joined the French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (Inria) as head of the Paris-Rocquencourt research center. He was named Chairman and CEO of the Inria in 2014, having been its deputy CEO.