About École Polytechnique

Born in 1947, Alain Aspect is an alumni of ENS Cachan and Université d'Orsay. He has held positions at Institut d'Optique, ENS Yaoundé (Cameroon), ENS Cachan, ENS/Collège de France, CNRS. He is currently a professor at Institut d'Optique Graduate School (Augustin Fresnel chair), and at Ecole Polytechnique, in Palaiseau. He is a member of several science academies in France, USA, Austria, Belgium, UK. Among several awards, he has received the CNRS Gold medal (2005), the Wolf Prize in Physics (2010), the Balzan prize on quantum information (2013), the Niels Bohr Gold medal (2013), the Albert Einstein medal (2013), the Ives medal of the Optical society of America (2013). Alain Aspect research has borne on tests of Bell's inequalities with entangled photon (PhD, 1974-1983), wave-particle duality for single photons (1984-86, with Philippe Grangier); laser cooling of atoms with lasers below the one photon recoil (1985-1992, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji); ultra-cold atoms, quantum gases, and quantum simulators (1992- , in the Atom Optics group he has established at Institut d'Optique).

A CNRS researcher specializing in atmospheric and oceanic dynamics, Alexandre Stegner has been teaching the issue of wind, hydraulic and marine resources for renewable energies for over ten years.

Alexis Tantet is a researcher at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) and an assistant professor at École Polytechnique in France. He studies climate change and variability and their impact on energy systems. He is also involved in various scientific mediation activities about climate change and energy transitions. He also contributes actively to a Political Ecology Workshop

Benjamin Richard is Head of the Structural Performance Analysis and Modeling Lab at the Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute (IRSN). He was a research engineer working at the French Sustainable Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) since October 2011 up to July 2018. He is interested in the numerical prediction of the seismic behavior of reinforced concrete structures dedicated to either civil engineering or nuclear engineering. Within the framework of research projects joining French or European major institutions working in the field of nuclear engineering, Benjamin Richard is in charge of developing efficient numerical strategies to assess the safety of complex structures regarding the seismic risk. In particular, he is interested in predicting specific nonlinear responses, such as cracking, that are of primary importance for design or safety studies. Benjamin Richard promotes the use of probabilistic approaches in risk assessment and vulnerability studies. Benjamin Richard is also a lecturer at Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris Saclay. He teaches the course entitled "seismic design of reinforced concrete and steel structures" to graduate students. In 2018, Benjamin Richard was author or coauthor of more than 31 papers published in international journals and more than 34 papers presented in international conference proceedings. Benjamin Richard is Head of the Technical and Scientific Committee of the French Association for Earthquake Engineering (AFPS) since 2019.

Professor of physic department of Ecole polytechnique Director of LPICM laboratory

Carl Graham is a CNRS researcher and lecturer at the École Polytechnique. His research focuses on stochastic modeling, particularly applied to communication networks and their algorithms. He is based at the Centre for Applied Mathematics at the École Polytechnique.

Claire Vandermeersch is documentary and cultural mediator at VetAgro. Training courses for polytechnic students, bachelors and doctoral students on documentary research and databases (Mathscinet, Scopus, SciVal, Europresse, etc.) Creation of a MOOC and tutorials on documentary research Management of the PEB (Interlibrary Loan) service via WinIBW. Visits and presentation lectures for new international students.

Cédric Giry is associate professor at the Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, in the Civil Engineering Departement. He develops his research activities at LMT (Laboratoire de Mécanique et Technologie) on the analysis of civil engineering structures subjected to static and severe loadings (earthquake). He develops also dedicated tools for the modeling of cracking in reinforced concrete structures and old masonry. He is in charge at LMT of the Thematical Research Unit “Dynamic and behavior of civil engineering structures”.

Emmanuel de Langre is a Professor of Mechanics in École Polytechnique, near Paris. He has worked as an engineer in the French nuclear industry. His principal research interests are in fluid-structure interactions and vibrations of engineering systems, such as heat exchangers and underwater offshore risers but also of natural systems such as crops and trees moving under wind load. He has created and taught the course on fluid-structure interaction at Ecole Polytechnique for more than ten years. He is presently the Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Fluids and Structures.

Erik Johnson is a CNRS researcher at the LPICM, located at the Ecole Polytechnique. In addition to his passion for teaching the physics and engineering of solar cells, his research interests focus on novel plasma processing for semiconductor devices. He is the current holder of the ANR Industrial Research Chair "PISTOL", in collaboration with Total.

My research activity is mainly based on the theoretical study, via the state-of-the-art of numerical methods, of electronic properties of real materials. I am particularly interested in the study of the limits of actual approaches and approximations, in order to propose solutions to go towards a better comprehension and description of the physics of the studied system. Several research lines are currently investigated: i) exciton dispersion and dimensionality effects; ii) new kernels for TDDFT; iii) interconnection among different spectroscopies (EELS, IXS, PES). An important part of my activity is also devoted to code developments. I am the coordinator of the ab initio codes DP (linear response TDDFT code) and EXC (Bethe-Salpeter equation code).

Gilles Horowitz was born in Paris in 1949. He received a MS in physics in 1973 and a PhD in semiconductor physics in 1975 at the University Paris 7 (now Paris-Diderot). One year later, he was hired as a research fellow by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Between 1976 and 1981, he worked at the French Atomic Energy Agency (CEA) at Saclay, on a program on the photo-electrochemical conversion and storage of solar energy. In 1982, he joined the Molecular Materials Lab (LMM) at Thiais, and in 1988 he launched a research program that led one year later to the realization of one of the first organic field-effect transistor (OFET). In 2000, he was appointed by the University Paris-Diderot, where he was full professor between 2005 and 2008. Finally, in 2010 he joined the group of Physics of Interfaces and Thin Films (PICM) at Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau. His current interests focus on the physical modeling of various organic electronic devices, including organic field-effect transistors, organic solar cells and organic electrochemical transistors (OECT).He is author or co-authors of more than 200 publications and communications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and 4 patents. Gilles Horowitz has been retired since July 2014 and is currently emeritus CNRS research fellow.

Isabelle Schaffner is a professor of French language, literature and civilization at the Ecole polytechnique (France). She directs the French Studies Program of the Department of Languages and Cultures (Ecole polytechnique). She currently teaches courses on French literature, cinema and humor. She is a researcher in French and Comparative Literature (LinX & ITEM-CNRS).

Jean Dalibard is a professor at the Collège de France on the chair "Atoms and radiation". His research is at the interface between atomic physics, quantum optics and statistical physics. He is particularly interested in quantum gases, notably Bose-Einstein condensates. Jean Dalibard taught quantum physics and statistical physics at the École polytechnique from 1989 to 2013.

Jean-Francois Semblat is Professor at ENSTA-Paris near Paris. His main fields of interest are wave propagation (in mechanics and seismology), dynamic soil-structure interaction, earthquake eng. and numerical modelling (FEM, BEM). He teaches seismology, soil dynamics, structural dynamics and numerical methods at ENSTA-Paris, Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Ponts-ParisTech and University of Pavia.

Jean-René Chazottes is a Research Director at the CNRS and works in the field of dynamical systems and random processes at the Centre de Physique Théorique of the École Polytechnique. He is also a part-time lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics of the École Polytechnique where he teaches probability and its applications.

After a degree in physics and a thesis in measurement and modeling of solar radiation, Jordi Badosa joined the Dynamic Meteorology Laboratory in 2010 to do research in solar forecasting for photovoltaic applications. In this frame, he lead the development of a software tool (PVSCOPE) for multi-horizon PV forecasting, that is used industrially under licence. In 2015, he widened his field of activity as project manager in instrumentation and experimentation of the research program on the energy transition at the École Polytechnique (TREND-X). In 2019 he was appointed technical director of the new Interdisciplinary Center Energy4Climate. He is in charge of the development of photovoltaic and wind test platforms as well as demonstrators for energy management at the building and Campus scales, all within the framework of interdisciplinary projects and with strong industrial collaboration.

Julie André is an assistant professor of French literature and language at the Ecole Polytechnique (France). She currently teaches French art, literature and politics at the Department of Languages and Cultures (Ecole polytechnique). She is a researcher in French Literature (LinX, ITEM) and a specialist of Proust's manuscripts.

After a master degree in Germany and a PhD in Italy, I got settled in France. I believe in international, open, diverse and inclusive science. We need each other to tackle hard problems together! As a founding member of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility, it has always been my aim to promote collaborations and to ease transfer of knowledge.

Manuel Joffre is a research director at the CNRS and an associate professor at the Ecole Polytechnique. He carries out his research activities at the Laboratoire d'Optique et Biosciences, shared by the Ecole Polytechnique, the CNRS and INSERM, where he studies protein dynamics using infrared femtosecond lasers. He teaches quantum physics at the Ecole Polytechnique.

Daniel Suchet is a lecturer at École Polytechnique and works at the Institut du Photovoltaïque d'Ile de France (IPVF UMR 9006). After completing his thesis in cold atoms, he focused on energy issues. Dedicated to science communication, he has engaged in various outreach efforts, including a year-long doctoral mission at the Palais de la Découverte, public conferences on science and fiction, and contributions to ActuSF.