Jean-François Joanny began his career at the CNRS, where he was a research fellow at the Collège de France's Quantum Condensed Matter Physics laboratory in Paris, then in Lyon. He was appointed Professor of Physics at the Université Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg in 1989, then Professor at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (UPMC) in 2003. A physicist, he is first and foremost a theorist who has worked on various aspects of soft matter physics, then physics for biology.

Between 2014 and 2018, he was Director General of the prestigious École supérieure de physique et chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI), where he also taught.

On his arrival in Paris at UPMC, he became director of the Institut Curie physics laboratory, a position he held until 2012. Since then, his research activities have focused on cell biophysics and fundamental cellular processes, tissue mechanics and growth, and cancer physics, describing these biological phenomena using the concept of active matter.

His work is the subject of 285 publications in international journals.

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 was a junior and senior member of the IUF.

Main scientific awards

• 1985: CNRS bronze medal
• 1986: Groupe Français des Polymères prize, shared with Ludwik Leibler
• 1991-1996: junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France
• 1993: Langevin Prize (theoretical physics) from the French Physical Society
• 2006-2016: Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France
• 2007: Del Duca grand prize from the Institut de France (shared with J. Prost)
• 2008: CNRS silver medal
• 2012: Gentner Kastler prize from the German and French Physical Societies
• 2017: Ampère prize from the French Academy of Sciences

Research and scientific activities

• Past: polymer solutions, polymer adsorption, copolymers, polyelectrolytes, polymer gels, colloidal suspensions, foams and emulsions, liquids at interfaces, liquid thin films, wetting and capillarity, spreading, Langmuir monolayers, membranes, soap films.
  
• Present and future: cell motility, out-of-equilibrium membranes for biology, self-organization and molecular motors, cytoskeleton, cell adhesion, cell oscillations, restriction enzymes, cytokinesis, tissue growth and mechanical properties, statistical physics of active matter.