Alexandre Gramfort

Career

Alexandre Gramfort's early research career included time at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Harvard University, followed by five years as an assistant professor in the signal processing and machine learning department at Telecom Paris. Gramfort then became a research director at Inria, where they led the MIND team, formerly known as Parietal, and also served as a co-director of the Center for Data Science at Université Paris-Saclay.¹

Gramfort joined Meta in 2022 and is now a Research Science Director at Meta Reality Labs. Their current work applies machine learning to decoding surface electromyography (EMG) signals for neuromotor interfaces.¹

Research

Gramfort's research spans statistical machine learning, signal and image processing, optimization and scientific computing, with primary applications in neuroscience and biosignal processing such as MEG and EEG. In 2015 Gramfort received a European Research Council Starting Grant for the project Signal and Learning Applied to Brain data (SLAB), and in 2019 an ANR Chair in Artificial Intelligence for a project called BrAIN.¹

At Meta, Gramfort is among the authors of "A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction", published in Nature in July 2025, which describes decoding surface EMG signals from the wrist to control computers.⁴¹

Open-source work

Gramfort is a co-creator of scikit-learn: the project's history records that Fabian Pedregosa, Gaël Varoquaux, Gramfort and Vincent Michel of INRIA took leadership of the project in 2010 and made its first public release on 1 February 2010. Gramfort co-authored the 2011 JMLR paper describing the library and is still listed on the project's maintainers team.²³

Gramfort is the initial creator of MNE-Python, a package for processing EEG and MEG data that covers forward and inverse modeling, preprocessing, statistics and time-frequency analysis, and stepped down as its BDFL in 2023. Gramfort has also co-created or contributed to Braindecode, pyRiemann, OpenMEEG and the Sphinx-Gallery documentation extension, while noting reduced open-source activity since joining Meta.¹⁵

Work and contributions

• scikit-learn Open-source code

  Co-creator and long-standing core developer; co-author of the 2011 JMLR paper "Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python", and listed in the active Maintainers Team on the project's About page.¹³²⁶

• MNE-Python Open-source code

  Initial creator and core developer of MNE-Python; Gramfort's homepage notes stepping down as the project's BDFL in 2023.¹⁵

Timeline

1. Feb 1, 2010Made the first public release of scikit-learn with Fabian Pedregosa, Gaël Varoquaux and Vincent Michel at INRIA.²
2. 2011Co-authored "Scikit-learn - Machine Learning in Python" in the Journal of Machine Learning Research.³
3. 2015Received a European Research Council Starting Grant for the SLAB project on learning from brain data.¹
4. 2019Received an ANR Chair in Artificial Intelligence for the BrAIN project.¹
5. 2022Joined Meta, later serving as Research Science Director at Meta Reality Labs.¹
6. 2023Stepped down as BDFL of the MNE-Python project.¹
7. Jul 23, 2025Co-authored a Nature paper on a generic non-invasive neuromotor interface based on surface EMG.⁴

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Research director (DR, HdR), leading the MIND team (formerly Parietal), Inria¹

Where they work

• Meta 106 people in the wiki

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