Arnold Migus - Biography#

Arnold Migus is born in Paris on 1st October 1948. He is a physicist and was during most ot its career a research director at CNRS. He is well known for his pioneering work in ultrafast lasers and their applications to ultrafast phenomena in physics, chemistry and biology. He is also an expert on large scale facility and technology transfer. He has more recently managed large institutions of higher education and research. He has finished in January 2010 his term of general director (CEO) of CNRS after achieving a four year mandate. In 2010, after leaving his position at the CNRS, he was appointed Conseiller Maître at the Cour des Comptes (Supreme Court of Audit). There, he was given the task of acting as referent for public policy evaluations, a brand new role for the Court since the constitutional reform of 2007. He himself carried out the Court's first evaluations, on the biofuel subsidy policy, on the implementation of the climate-energy package (at the request of Parliament) and on high-speed rail lines. He has also been responsible for auditing a number of French institutions and, in 2018, he is taking part in the external audit of UNESCO.

After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, Arnold Migus joined in 1974 the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and then AT&T Bell Labs (Holmdel, NJ, USA) in 1978. Back in France, he joined the Applied Optics Laboratory (LOA) at Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau and becomes research director at CNRS in 1985. He developed there pioneering works on ultrafast lasers and spectroscopy and is one of the founder of an INSERM (Medical research) unit on Molecular and Cellular Photobiology where he stayed until the LOA became a joint physics laboratory with CNRS. Arnold Migus is internationally well-known for the work he performed in LOA leading for example to the discovery of the presolvated electron in water, the fist steps in bacterial photosynthesis, the dynamic of heme conformation hemoproteins or the optical Stark effect in semiconductors. He chaired with Jean-Louis Martin, Gérard Mourou and Ahmed Zewail the1992 Ultrafast Phenomena conference.

Arnold Migus taught laser physics and applications from 1982 until 1993 in various higher education institutions: Université Paris 11 at Orsay, Ecole Nationale des Telecom¬munications, Ecole Nationale des Techniques Avancées in Paris. He spent a sabbatical in Berkeley (LBNL) in 1990 and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (Center of Ultrafast Optical Science) in the period 1994 -1995. In 1996 he became director of a large scale European laser facility, the LULI at Ecole Polytechnique and upgraded it to the level of a quasi petawatt laser. In 2003 he joined the Institute of Optics as its general director and moved it from Orsay to a new infrastructure in the Polytechnique campus in Palaiseau, creating a cluster with also the Thales laboratories and other companies (Horiba Jobin-Yvon for instance).

In 2003, he created in parallel the ILP (Institut Laser Plasma) in Bordeaux and became its first general director until 2006. He also managed in parallel a research team in CEA, first in the Paris area (in Limeil with the Phebus and P102 laser facilities) and later in the Bordeaux area, pioneering chirped pulse amplification (CPA) in large power laser (LIL and LMJ) and applications to inertial confinement fusion for energy. In addition to CPA developments, he also discovered with his team at CEA in 1993 the first random laser.

From 1994 until 2005 he was a member of the French National Committee on Research (assessment of research in optics, atomic and molecular physics section) where he also chaired the CNRS Engineering Sciences Council. He held the position of Topical Editor of Optics Letters (Journal of the Optical Society of America) until 2006. He has published himself above 130 articles in internationally refereed journals (ISI h index = 44, 6200 citations).

Arnold Migus has been a consultant in the laser industry (Quantel) from 1988 to 1993 and a scientific adviser at CEA from 1988 until 2006. He has been a member of the French Defense Science Board since 1998. He was at the origin of two winning prizes for high-tech spin-off companies : Laselec in 2001 (solid state diode pumped lasers), Phasics in 2003 (solutions in high resolution wavefront analysis and sensing for laser metrology and adaptive optics) and helped the success of another start-up, FastLite (ultrafast pulse shaping and pulse measurement systems). He is one of the founders of the "Optics Valley" cluster and a board member of various other clusters (Pôles de compétitivité): System@tic Ile-de-France, Aquitaine Laser et Photonique et Applications, etc. ). Many of its former PhD. Students are now in charge of optical start-up.

While general director of CNRS, he was elected vice-president of both the European Heads of Research Councils (EUROHORCS) and the European Science Foundation (ESF) until 2010.

He was elected "Fellow of the Optical Society of America" in 1995, "Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States of America" in 2007 and member of Academia Europaea in 2011.

An honorary magistrate since 2018, Arnold Migus has been invited to join various councils and think tanks, particularly on the evaluation of public policies and in the socio-medical or biology-health fields. From 2011 to 2022, he chaired the Scientific Advisory Board of OSE (Œuvre de secours aux enfants), and since 2019 has been involved in various working groups and publications of the French Académie nationale de médecine, on the multiannual research programming law (LPPR), on overcoming the Covid-19 crisis, on the reform of biology and health research, on RNA-based vaccines and therapeutics, and on the rational use of bibliometrics to understand the various disciplines in the biology and health sector. He was elected a corresponding member of the Académie nationale de médecine in 2019 and a full member in March 2023.