Julien Laurat

Julien Laurat appointed Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France

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The Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) champions the advancement of high-level research within universities and fosters interdisciplinary collaboration among its members. A decree of August 26, 1991, established the IUF as a service of the ministry responsible for higher education. The IUF appoints teacher-researchers who demonstrate excellence in their scientific activities and international influence.

Julien Laurat, a University Professor at Sorbonne University, earned a prestigious appointment to the IUF. The Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation issued the order on May 26, 2022, with the appointment commencing on October 1, 2022, for a five-year term.

Laurat’s academic journey began with a Ph.D. in quantum optics, which he earned in 2004 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) in Paris, France. Subsequently, he spent a year at the Institut d’Optique-Graduate School in Orsay before pursuing a two-year Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. In 2007, however, he returned to Paris and is now a Professor at Sorbonne Université and a member of the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel (SU, Ecole Normale, CNRS, Collège de France). Moreover, the IUF elected Laurat as a member in 2011.

Additionally, Laurat’s primary research interests center on quantum networking, encompassing areas such as quantum state engineering and the development of light-matter interfaces based on cold neutral atoms. Furthermore, in 2012, the European Research Council awarded him a Starting Grant for his project: “HybridNet: Hybrid quantum networks”.

Institute Universitaire de France

The mission of the Institut Universitaire de France is to promote the development of high-level research in universities and to strengthen interdisciplinarity amongts its researchers, by pursuing three main objectives:

  1. Encourage institutions and teacher-researchers to excel in research, with the positive consequences that can be expected on teaching, the training of young researchers and more generally the dissemination of knowledge.
  2. Contribute to gender equality within the research community.
  3. Contribute to a balanced distribution of university research in the country, and therefore to a policy of scientific networking of the territory.