Tatiana Budtova is a senior researcher at the Materials Forming Center (CEMEF) of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (Mines Paris). She is expert in the physical chemistry of polymers, in particular, in bio-based polymers and their gels and aerogels. In 1987, she obtained her master’s degree in physics at the St. Petersburg State University. In 1992, she defended her thesis at the Institute of Macromolecular Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1999, she obtained her university habilitation at the University Nice-Sophia-Antipolis (Université Côte d'Azur since 2019) and at the Mines Paris. She joined Mines Paris in 2004. Currently she is the head of the biobased polymers and composites team in CEMEF. Her research focuses on the development of materials from natural polymers such as cellulose, starch, pectin and chitosan . She has developed pectin-based aerogels which are thermal insulating materials with extremely low thermal conductivity (so-called superinsulating materials). For this she received in 2014 the ADEME (French Agency for the Environment and Energy Management) Prize for Innovative Techniques for the Environment. In 2015, she was named “Chevalier des Palmes académiques”, and in 2020 she received the CNRS Silver Medal. She published more than 150 scientific articles and was responsible for numerous national and international projects.