Laurence Petit is a graduate engineer (MSc) from the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris (Chimie Paristech). She also holds a DEA (post-graduate research degree) in computational and theoretical chemistry, as well as a PhD in quantum chemistry from the University of Grenoble. She has been certified as a Project Management Professional by the Project Management Institute (PMI) since 2015.
She began her career in 2007 at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where she completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship for TOTAL.
From 2008 to 2019, Laurence Petit worked at the French National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management (Andra). She first worked in R&D, and in 2010 she took charge of managing Andra’s “Investissements d’Avenir” (Investing in the Future) programme (€75M), a position she held until 2019. Starting in 2016, she became Head of Innovation at Andra, and in 2019 she was appointed Deputy Director of Development, Innovation, and International Relations Division.
Laurence Petit joined CEA at the end of 2019 as Technical Innovation Advisor to the Chairman and CEO, François Jacq, a role she held until the end of 2021. She has been Director for Innovation at CEA since 2022. She is specifically responsible for the strategic and operational management of all CEA’s start-up support programs (maturation, incubation, venture builder – around 25 projects in portfolio simultaneously – 10 to 15 spinoff creations each year) and for managing CEA investment subsidiary