Baroness Ingrid Daubechies (/doʊbəˈʃiː/ doh-bə-SHEE;[1] French: [dobʃi]; born 17 August 1954) is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician.

Her research involves the use of automatic methods from both mathematics, technology, and biology to extract information from samples such as bones and teeth.

[5] She also developed sophisticated image processing techniques used to help establish the authenticity and age of some of the world's most famous works of art, including paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt.

During the next few years, she visited the CNRS Center for Theoretical Physics in Marseille several times, where she collaborated with Alex Grossmann; this work was the basis for her doctorate in quantum mechanics.

At Courant she made her best-known discovery: based on quadrature mirror filter-technology she constructed compactly supported continuous wavelets that would require only a finite amount of processing, in this way enabling wavelet theory to enter the realm of digital signal processing.

In 1988, she published the result of her research on orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics.

[17] In 2016, she and Heekyoung Hahn[18] founded Duke Summer Workshop in Mathematics (SWIM) for rising high school seniors who were female.

Using highly precise photographs and X-rays of the panels as well as various filtering methods, the team of mathematicians found an automatic way to detect the cracks caused by aging.

[26][27] In 1998, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences[28] and won the Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society.

[36] In January 2005, Daubechies became the third woman since 1924 to give the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture sponsored by the American Mathematical Society.

[37] In September 2006, the Pioneer Prize from the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics was awarded jointly to Daubechies and Heinz Engl.

[38] In 2011, Daubechies was the SIAM John von Neumann Lecturer,[39] and was awarded the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal,[40] the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research from the American Mathematical Society,[41] and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering from the Franklin Institute.

[45] The Simons Foundation, a private foundation based in New York City that funds research in mathematics and the basic sciences, gave Daubechies the Math + X Investigator award, which provides money to professors at American and Canadian universities to encourage new partnerships between mathematicians and researchers in other fields of science.

[2] In 2018, Daubechies won the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics from City University of Hong Kong (CityU).

[58] Daubechies has been awarded The Bakerian Medal and Lecture 2025 for her work on wavelets and image compression and her exceptional contributions to a wide spectrum of physical, technological, and mathematical applications.

[60] In 1985, Daubechies met mathematician Robert Calderbank when he was on a three-month exchange visit from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey to the Brussels-based mathematics division of Philips Research.