Laurent Gatineau new President of CY Cergy Paris University

On Wednesday, 18 January 2023, Laurent Gatineau was elected president of CY Cergy Paris Université for a two-year term by the University Council members on the proposal of the governing board by an absolute majority, with 27 votes for 28 voters. He takes over François Germinet.

CY Cergy Paris Université is experiencing a new stage in its development course. After the success of the creation of CY under the impetus of François Germinet, the forthcoming end of the experimental phase will mark a phase of consolidation of the institution. I hope that it will allow us to take the time to deepen our relationships with our partners and launch our campus project's first achievements," stated Laurent Gatineau.

CY Cergy Paris Université is an ambitious young university that has transformed over the last decade, putting Cergy on the map of universities that count in France. This impressive dynamic, the result of the commitment of all the academic and support community work, has enabled the university to increase its student numbers by 60% and to obtain 100 million Euros in funding from the French government's Investment Programme for the Future (Programme d'Investissements d'Avenir)  and a 100 million Euros funding from the French State-Region Planning Contract (CPER). This change of scale of the institution is part of our various engagements with the State through the pluriannual "site contract" that fixes the university's strategic objectives towards the State, with the French National Research Agency (ANR) and with the local authorities.

Laurent Gatineau's ambition is to implement existing projects in a challenging budgetary context due to inflation and to prepare the following contract between CY and the State for 2026-2030. To achieve these goals, he proposes an evolution of practices, an optimisation of CY's assets and a reflection on the core business.

Laurent Gatineau's background

Since September 2020, Laurent Gatineau has been the Vice President of institutional policy at CY Cergy Paris Université.  Previously he held the position of Vice President in charge of budgetary dialogue. Laurent Gatineau holds a doctorate with honours in geography from the University of Bordeaux 3. He joined the University of Cergy-Pontoise in 2005 as an associate professor. In 2009, he became a lecturer at Cergy-Potoise's University Institute of Technology of Cergy-Pontoise and the head of the Logistics and Transport Management Department. From 2016 to 2020, Laurent Gatineau was the university's Humanities Department director. Since 2015, he has been in charge of the Logistics Management course for the geography master's degree in Development and Environment.

In addition to his teaching activities, Laurent Gatineau was from 2009 to 2021 a researcher at the EA MRTE Laboratory (Mobilities, Networks, Territories and Environment) since 2022 at the MATRiS research laboratory (Mobilities, Planning, Transport, Risks and Society). He has worked in the Innovative Light Train consortium as part of the public call for the Digitalisation and Decarbonisation of Rail Transport.

See here the original press release in French