I had some very inspiring professors that demonstrated the powers of thermodynamics. Since the very beginning, I was inspired by the universality and versatility of the discipline.
During my first year of master I benefited from an exchange program and had the opportunity to spend my whole year in Karlsruhe. That was a unique experience, two of my fellows there became friends and I particularly appreciated the german pedagogie.
I came back to Grenoble and Université Joseph Fourier as it was named then to focus on statistical mechanics, condensed matter and mesoscopic physics. I discovered then superconductivity and found the field interesting enough to start my PhD on the topic.
Before, as most french men of my generation, I had to give time to serve in the army. I had the chance to get into the service of cooperation and Prof Andrew Kent at New York University accepted me in his lab for that. That was the second great experience in my life. I tried to setup a scanning hall probe microscope. I focused on the hall sensors and was very happy with that.
Back to France I started my PhD on high temperature superconductors that were highly mediatised at that time since a lot of expectations were put on them. My PhD challenge was to probe the density of state of excitations in a superconductors by using the tunnel effect, a typical quantum effect. Where as I was supposed to probe the full symetry of the excitation spectrum, I focused on the fabrication of highly transparent planar junction.
After my PhD at the turn of the century, I switch topics and was hosted in a cell-biology lab, mostly interested in the adhesion of cells to the extracellular matrix and in cell-cell junctions. I used my knowledge in microfabrication to pionneer, in France, the patterning of adhesive protein. The main goal was to control the cell micro-environement in order to control its organisation and thus its behaviour.
I was recruited in 2003 in my PhD lab to study biological system and apply condensed matter methods to the field of biology. I am since 2004 an assistant professor, a permanent position in France, at the department of physics at the university Grenoble Alpes. My team at Institut Néel is the thermodynamics at of small systems and biophysics.