Sylvain GIGAN

ORCID : 0000-0002-9914-6231

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JOFkspMAAAAJ&hl=en

Biography

Sylvain Gigan has been a Professor of Physics at Sorbonne Université since 2014. He conducts his research at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory (Physics Department of the École Normale Supérieure), where he leads a research group dedicated to photonics and complex media. Since January 2024, he also serves as the Deputy Director of the laboratory.

After earning his PhD in quantum optics at UPMC in 2004 under the supervision of Claude Fabre , he joined the University of Vienna (Austria) as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Markus Aspelmeyer and Anton Zeilinger, working on quantum optomechanics. From 2007 to 2014, he was an Associate Professor at the Langevin Institute (ESPCI ParisTech), where he pioneered his research on controlling light in complex media.

His current work focuses on wave propagation in highly scattering media. Historically centered on deep imaging and mesoscopic physics, his research has now expanded to harnessing optical disorder for high-dimensional quantum information and optical computing (hardware acceleration for artificial intelligence). In 2016, his fundamental research led to the co-founding of the spin-off LightOn.

Research Areas

• Computational and Deep Imaging: Wavefront shaping, transmission matrix measurement, and fluorescence imaging to see through opaque biological tissues
• Optical Computing and AI: Leveraging multiple scattering to implement optical computing architectures, such as reservoir computing and nonlinear encoding, in a highly parallel and energy-efficient manner
• Quantum Technologies: Manipulating non-classical states of light through multimode fibers and complex media (spatial multimode quantum optics)
• Applications: Applying these fundamental technologies to neurophotonics, bio-imaging

Awards & Major Funding

• Awards: Cecil DeWitte Prize, French Academy of Science (2025) Jean Jerphagnon Prize (2019) , Atos-Joseph Fourier Prize (2018) , and the Fabry de Gramont Prize from the French Optical Society (2016).
• Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) (2023-2028)
• Optica Fellow (2023)
• European Research Council (ERC) Grants: SMARTIES (Consolidator Grant, 2016) and COMEDIA (Starting Grant, 2011).
• International Support: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) for deep tissue imaging, NIH Brain Initiative, DARPA, Swiss National Fund, Human Frontier Science Program

Publications

see full list of publication on Google Scholar

full research output : here.