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Interview of Joseph Zyss, Professor at ENS Cachan, LPQM (UMR8537); Director of D'Alembert Institute
Was it easy to bring IDA to its current status (federation of 4 units, 1 LEA in Nanobiosciences with the Weizmann Institute since 2008, already 5 campaigns of financed IDA projects, 6 shared platforms, 1 Erasmus Mundus Master...) ? How did you lead the evolution of IDA considering the specifities of each lab ?]
The list of those activities, to which one would want to add the building dedicated to IDA, is at the output of more than a decade of efforts, thereby respectful of natural time constraints. It is also a collective undertaking which involved, one way or another, most members of the four participating units. Results which are now obviously at the outcome of this process, have benefited from the lowering of cultural and human barriers which is inherent to IDA's vocation. It was also a matter of fighting natural trends of all human groups or too well defined knowledge community, by putting emphasis on the benefits to be riped from opening to complementary methods and cultures. Whereas landmarks and a stable references are valuable milestones to start from and surely with which to keep in touch, creativity and innovation will rather emerge insome sort of imbalanced situations out of the comforting borders of one's original frame.
The list of those activities, to which one would want to add the building dedicated to IDA, is at the output of more than a decade of efforts, thereby respectful of natural time constraints. It is also a collective undertaking which involved, one way or another, most members of the four participating units. Results which are now obviously at the outcome of this process, have benefited from the lowering of cultural and human barriers which is inherent to IDA's vocation. It was also a matter of fighting natural trends of all human groups or too well defined knowledge community, by putting emphasis on the benefits to be riped from opening to complementary methods and cultures. Whereas landmarks and a stable references are valuable milestones to start from and surely with which to keep in touch, creativity and innovation will rather emerge insome sort of imbalanced situations out of the comforting borders of one's original frame.
Professor of Physics at ENS Cachan, you have lead or co-lead two research teams in LPQM. In 2014 you decide to put an end to your position of IDA Director so as to devote more time to your research work. To which projects are you willing to focus on ?
I am not sure that my research potential is up to the challenges which tempt me, but it is a fact that I never felt totally safe in this respect over now decades of research activities. Besides, to paraphrase a distinguished colleague's statement « we only worth what our next paper is worth ! ». I nevertheless feel inspired and attracted by the multiscale engineering of multifuntional structures able to hybridize the three big material families which are metals, bioorganic molecules and semiconductors so as to bring them to cooperative properties of a new kind. The nanometric scale appears to stand at a crucial cross-road, in scientific as well as technological terms, between « top down » and « bottom up » approaches. However, some major bottleneck issues remain to be solved in terms of organization of nanometric entities at a larger scale, in order to relatet the building blocks in some comprehensive structure that will promote their interactions. I'm currently working in this direction within a hybrid nanoplasmonic template, bearing appealing perspectives such as towards biodiagnosis or new photonic components.
For the 10 years anniversary of IDA, you expressed your passion for research through this maxim for the institute « from dream to realizations, from realization to dream ». What are now your dreams as a researcher ?
Who would have predicted a mere decade ago that metals, known to be opaque light absorbers, would take an eminent position in the race towards new photonic configurations ? Likewise, who would have ventured to fancy that hybridisation between strands of DNA would appear like a possible path to organize nano-particles with the unprecedented precision of a nanometer ruler and therefrom onto highly efficient biophotonic nano-antennal ?
My dream is to attend and if possible to contribute, to the limited extent of my abilities, to one or two other of those conceptual and practical revolutions to come, but dreams being by nature not fully decipherable, mine do not go as far as fully predicting the nature of such revolutions to come, except that come they will !