CESQ will host a colloquium by Jianshu Cao from MIT, USA, entitled
Polariton chemistry: quantum control with cavity photons
on Wednesday September 2 at 3pm in the CESQ seminar room, Cronenbourg Campus. It will be followed by a coffee break in the CESQ main hall (Contact : solaro@unistra.fr)
Since one month we have welcome a new postdoctoral researcher in the team, Merin Varghese Pulikkottil, from Kerala, India. Merin completed her BSc and MSc in Chemistry and then pursued her PhD at IISER Thiruvananthapuram, under the supervision of Prof. K. George Thomas. During her PhD, she explored exciton dynamics in colloidal nanocrystals, with a focus on understanding their excited-state properties using time-resolved spectroscopic techniques, mainly transient absorption and single-particle spectroscopy. Building on this background in excited-state dynamics and spectroscopy, she is now eager to explore light–matter interactions in the strong coupling regime and understand how strong coupling can influence molecular and material properties. Welcome Merin !
We had a nice reunion at Habibi last week, like in the good old days :), with some former postdoctoral researchers from the group and actual members/former master students ! 
After the Poster Prize during the last eMRS Spring Meeting, this year Anjali Jayachandran received the Young Researcher Award “in recognition for her outstanding contribution to the Symposium O (Polaritonics for next generation materials)”. Congratulations Anjali !
We are delighted to announce that our phD student, Audrey Pollien, received the research award (Prix de la recherche) at the graduation ceremony on May 22 at ENS Paris Saclay. This award is given annually to two students from all disciplines for the excellence of their research achievements. On this occasion, Audrey gave a very interesting talk on her vision of research which can be viewed on youtube. (Between 59mn and 1h04mn).
Congratulations Audrey !
Sources : ENS Paris Saclay and Audrey Pollien
After Audrey Pollien three months ago, it was the turn of Antoine Tartar to give a talk at the Young Scientist Seminar of ISIS last week. He recalled us how a motor is working and showed that thanks to an optical trap made of a tightly focused laser beam, one can emulate a motor at the microscale, and optimize its energetic costs. Congratulations for the talk and… for the wedding that happened the day after !
We have the pleasure to announce the arrival of a new permanent member in the LIMACS group ! Salambô Dago joined the team in February 2026 with a position of CNRS researcher. She got her PhD at the Laboratoire de Physique de l’ENS Lyon on Thermodynamics of information, under the supervision of Ludovic Bellon and Sergio Ciliberto. She later joined the Aspelmeyer group in the University of Vienna to start a Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellowship on feedback control of quantum levitated particles, under the supervision of Nikolai Kiesel.
She will now continue working on optimal control of levitated nano-object to study energy exchanges and thermodynamics at the nano-scale, from the classical to the quantum regime. Welcome to her !
It is our pleasure to invite you to attend the seminar entitled
Unusual transport in odd-diffusive systems
that Dr. Erik Kalz (Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam) will give on Tuesday, May 5th at 2pm.It will be held in the meeting room (ground floor) of ISIS on the Esplanade campus.
Do not hesitate to contact Dr Cyriaque Genet if you would like to meet Dr. Kalz during his visit.
With a bit of delay, we are happy to introduce Jeanne Herry, a phD student sharing her time between Lyon and Strasbourg. Jeanne followed a pluridisciplinary chemistry-physics cursus at ENS Lyon. She completed a first master degree specialized in teaching to obtain agrégation, french diploma for teaching. She then completed a second one, research oriented and dedicated to materials chemistry and advanced characterization techniques. After a training at LCH laboratory, on chirooptical properties of achiral fluorophores coupled to chiral plasmonic nanoparticules, she started her phD in September, cosupervised by Dr Cyriaque Genet and Dr Matthias Pauly (ENS Lyon). Welcome Jeanne !
After completing a postdoctoral stay in the group of Prof. E. W. (Bert) Meijer, Kripa has returned as a postdoctoral researcher since one month and will be with us until the end of October, based in office 104. Welcome back !
