Marie Françoise Ouedraogo


Marie Françoise Ouedraogo is a Burkinabé mathematician. She has previously served in government as permanent secretary of the national policy of good governance.

Biography

Born in December 1967, Ouedraogo was raised in Ouagadougou. She was drawn to the study of mathematics at a young age as she received good grades without putting forth much effort. She was educated at the University of Ouagadougou, where she wrote her first thesis on Lie superalgebras in 1999. Akry Koulibaly served as her doctoral adviser. From 2005 to 2008 Ouedraogo served as the permanent secretary of the national policy of good governance. She was committed to ending forms of corruption, especially in the realm of public transport. According to her, good governance is a state of mind. She then prepared a Ph.D. thesis at Blaise Pascal University of Clermont-Ferrand in France under the co-direction of Sylvie Paycha and Akry Koulibaly. Her Ph.D. thesis was about pseudodifferential operators and was accepted in 2009. Ouedraogo is the first Burkinabé woman who defended a thesis in mathematics.
Ouedraogo teaches in the Mathematics Department of the University of Ouagadougou. Her research interests are pseudodifferential operators and superalgebras.

Service

In 2009, she became president of the African Mathematical Union Commission on Women in Mathematics in Africa. The AMUCWMA seeks to get girls in Africa more interested in mathematics and potentially choose it as a career. In October 2012, she co-hosted a workshop with the International Center of Pure and Applied Mathematics to generate interest in mathematics among African women. On 11 July 2013, Ouedraogo was elected president of the newly formed African Women in Mathematics Association. She gave a talk entitled "Mathematics and Women: Different Regions, Similar Struggles" at the ICWM forum in August 2014.

Publications