Michel Raynal is an Emeritus Professor at IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is a senior member of the “Institut Universitaire de France” and a member of “Academia Europaea”. His main research interests are the fundamental principles of distributed computing systems. Recognized as a world leading researcher in distributed computing, he is the author of numerous papers on this topic (more than 180 in int’l scientific journals, and more than 360 papers in int’l conferences). He is also well-known for his books on distributed computing. From a « purely numeric » point of view, his h-index is 61 and his i-10 index is 304.

He has chaired the program committee of the major conferences on the topic (e.g., ICDCS, DISC,SIROCCO, OPODIS, ICDCN, etc.) and served on the program committees of more than 160 int’l conferences including all the most prestigious ones. He is the recipient of several « Best Paper » awards of major conferences (including ICDCS 1999, 2000 and 2001, SSS 2009 and 2011, Europar 2010, DISC 2010, PODC 2014). He supervised/ co-supervised more than 45 PhD students. He gave lectures on distributed computing in many universities all over the world. In the recent past, Michel Raynal has written four books: « Communication and Agreement Abstractions for Fault-Tolerant Asynchronous Distributed Systems », Morgan & Claypool 251 pages, 2010 (ISBN 978-1-60845-293-4); « Fault-Tolerant Agreement in Synchronous Distributed Systems », 165 pages, Morgan & Claypool, September 2010), (ISBN 978-1-60845-525-6); « Concurrent Programming: Algorithms, Principles and Foundations », Springer, 515 pages, 2012 (ISBN 978-3-642-32026-2), and « Distributed Algorithms for Message-passing Systems », Springer, 510 pages, 2013 (ISBN: 978-3-642-32026-2).

In 2015, he was awarded the Prize “Innovation in Distributed Computing” (award ceremony during the SIROCCO 2015 conference), and was elected member of Academia Europaea. In 2018, he received the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing. In 2019, he received the Outstanding Career Award from ACM Sigops France. He is currently the editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory published by Morgan & Claypool.