Professor Dr. Nathalie Picqué is establishing a new department as Director at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) in Berlin, Germany. Her appointment at the end of 2023 is combined with a position as Professor of Physics (W3-S) at the Humboldt-University of Berlin.
The Department of Precision Physics focuses on exploring new insights in fundamental molecular and optical physics with advancing tools of laser science, nonlinear optics and photonics. It is advancing laser frequency comb and dual-comb technology, searching for new physics by pushing the limits of precision laser spectroscopy of simple molecules, expanding the frontiers of interferometry and investigating novel applications. At MBI, Nathalie Picqué continues to pursue her passion for research into light-matter interaction. She is looking forward to collaborating with the scientists of MBI and to the emergence of new research topics.
Nathalie Picqué is a French physicist who was previously a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) and, before that, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Orsay, France). She received her doctoral degree in Physics from the University of Paris-Saclay (France) in 1998. Her research interests are in the fields of optics and molecular physics, in particular in interferometry, precision spectroscopy and laser technology. Her research focuses on the exploration of new ideas involving laser frequency combs and on the application of these novel concepts to metrology, molecular spectroscopy, holography and chip-scale sensing. She is a pioneer in the development and application of techniques of spectroscopy over broad spectral bandwidths using optical frequency combs. These methods include dual-comb spectroscopy and Fourier transform spectroscopy with an optical frequency comb.
Nathalie Picqué has received several awards, including the 2021 Gentner-Kastler Prize in Physics, a 2021 European Research Council Advanced Grant, the 2022 Breakthrough in Physical Sciences of the Falling-Walls Foundation and the 2023 Cécile DeWitt-Morette Prize of the French Academy of Sciences. As thesis advisor and postdoctoral mentor, Nathalie Picqué has long been committed to training outstanding young researchers. Twenty-three of her former students and postdocs are now professors at universities around the world, leading their own laboratories.
