Antoine Compagnon has been Professor of Modern and Contemporary French Literature at the Collège de France since 2006, and Professor at Columbia University (New York). He is a historian of French literature, novelist and critic, author of Le Démon de la théorie (Seuil, 1998), Les Antimodernes, de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Gallimard, 2005), La Classe de rhéto (Gallimard, 2012), Baudelaire l'irréductible (Flammarion, 2014), and Les Chiffonniers de Paris (Gallimard, 2017).
Jean Dalibard is Professor of Atoms and Radiation at the Collège de France. He is interested in the manipulation of atomic gases by light, in particular their trapping and cooling. This research is directly linked to topics initiated by Einstein, from Brownian motion and photon absorption and emission processes, to Bose-Einstein condensation in which coherent matter waves are formed. He is co-author of several books or book chapters on quantum physics and its applications to the N-body problem.
Jean-François Joanny is Professor of Physics at Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris. He has been Managing Director of ESPCI Paris since January 2014. He began his career at the CNRS, Collège de France in Paris, then in Lyon. He was appointed Professor of Physics at Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg in 1989. He is a theoretical physicist and has worked on various aspects of soft matter physics. In 2003, Jean-François Joanny moved to UPMC in Paris to head the Institut Curie physics laboratory. Since then, he has been working on cell biophysics, tissue mechanics and growth, and cancer physics. Jean-François Joanny has been awarded several distinctions, including silver and bronze medals from the CNRS and the Prix Ampère from the Académie des Sciences. He has been a junior and senior member of the IUF.
