Virtual International Microscopy Lecture Series - Professor Christian Colliex

Christian Colliex

Christian Colliex is presently Emeritus CNRS Research Director, in the Electron Microscopy group at the Solid State Physics laboratory in Orsay. During his career started as young CNRS researcher in 1965 and pursued as a permanent CNRS research staff basically at LPS Orsay until his retirement in 2013, he has been researcher for shorter or longer periods of time at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (UK), visiting professor at ASU (USA), IBM researcher at Almaden, San Jose (USA). Over six years he has served as director of the Aimé Cotton Laboratory in Orsay, which is a proper CNRS laboratory dedicated to basic atomic, molecular and cluster physics (1996-2002).

His main fields of interest have concerned the development and use of new instrumentation and methodologies for local analysis in condensed matter. Relying mostly on electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) in electron microscopy, these techniques have served to investigate down to the atomic level, the structural, chemical, electronic and optical properties of isolated nanostructures, nano-objects and defects. They also constitute a very useful tool for the study of interfaces and defects in many types of materials (of natural origin or artificially grown).

He has created a group of researchers which has welcomed for short or long periods many researchers from all over the world (UK, USA, Canada, Japan, China, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Australia …) for training, for collaboration in the use of these instruments and for running international cooperative programs such as the Japanese ICORP on “Nanotubulites” with Sumio Iijima or the European Integrated Infrastructure in Advanced Electron Microscopy (ESTEEM) with all major European groups. This STEM group, headed successively by Odile Stéphan from 2009 to 2021 and now by Mathieu Kociak, has further continued this activity with great success and developed it into new fields such as nanophotonics.

Elected as President of the International Federation of the Societies for Microscopy (IFSM) from 2007 to 2011, he has served as President of the International Conference on Microscopies ICM 17 at Rio de Janeiro (2010).
He has been laureate of the French Academy of Sciences (1995 and France-Taiwan Grand Prize in 2005), he has been awarded with the Holweck Prize from both IoP (UK) and SFP (France) in 2009, with the Grande Médaille of the French Society for Metallurgy and Materials sciences in 2010 and with the V.E. Cosslett medal of the IFSM in 2018.