Cécile Deterre is the CTO of Blue Planet Ecosystems (Vienna) and winner of the Women in Ag Award, category “Technology & Research”
If you weren’t at the Women in Ag Awards ceremony on November 12th, you missed out. Never have there been so many winners, laureates, candidates and former winners present in Hannover. Among them was the winner of this year’s Research & Technology Award Cécile Deterre. A very unconventional profile for the agriculture industry, which made for a very interesting conversation. Let’s meet Cécile.
Cécile Deterre is a former particle physicist who is now applying her deep knowledge of analytical methods, machine learning, and data science to reshape the aquaculture space. Drawing on this background, she is developing algorithms for land-based recirculating aquaculture systems aimed at sustainable seafood production. These systems are designed to be managed with advanced control software that regulates key aquatic parameters and uses computer vision to monitor fish behaviour.
Hi Cécile, please introduce yourself !
My name is Cécile Deterre.
I’m French by birth, I live in Vienna, Austria, and I’ve had a rather atypical career. I’ve been passionate about physics since I was a little girl, but I studied engineering to get a more general education and then specialized in particle physics. And I had a career in particle physics for almost ten years. “At first I was in France, then I moved to Germany, Hamburg where I worked on experiments located in the USA and at CERN.”
After a while in research though, you have to do one post-doc after another and without a permanent post, it all becomes rather demotivating. So I decided to retrain as a data scientist. By that time, we had moved to Austria and it was there, at the start of my job search in data science, that I met the co-founders of Blue Planet Ecosystems.
So you finding Blue Planet Ecosystems (BPE) was a lucky coincidence?
Yes, we moved to Vienna because my husband is from there and we wanted to be closer to family. I met one of the co-founders, who was French, by chance, through a French friend. And pretty soon I basically had a choice between a consulting job and this. I had two very young children then and I’d never really been interested in start-ups before because of the risks. But I thought, this is such a unique opportunity and the project is so exciting that I didn’t hesitate and went for it.
And that’s how I started working in agriculture because honestly, I’d been pretty disconnected from it before.
This article was published in Women in Ag Magazine 2025-004. Click here to read the full article.
