Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Precise Measurement in Optics: Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation with Nathalie Picqué

Nathalie Picqué, Filipe Almeida

2022 Breakthrough Conversations Physical Sciences Science Breakthrough of the Year

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Nathalie Picqué, Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year 2022 in the category of Physical Sciences. She talked about her role as a research group leader at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the impact of COVID-19 on science.

The interview series provided an intimate personal atmosphere, in which high-level guests, speakers and panelists of the Falling Walls Science Summit 2022 talked about their individual research, career paths and experiences.

The Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversations are supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and Springer Nature.

MPI of Quantum Optics

Nathalie Picqué

Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics

Nathalie Picqué is a research group leader at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany). She was previously a tenured research scientist with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Orsay (France). She received her doctoral degree in Physics from Université Paris-Saclay (France) in 1998. Her research interests are in the areas of optics and molecular physics, more particularly in interferometry, precision spectroscopy and laser technology. Her research focuses on exploring new ideas that involve laser frequency combs and on applying these novel concepts to metrology, molecular spectroscopy, holography and chip-scale sensing. A 2019 Optica fellow, Nathalie Picqué has received several awards, including the 2007 Bronze Medal of the CNRS, the 2013 Coblentz award in Molecular Spectroscopy, the 2021 Gentner-Kastler Prize in Physics, a 2021 European Research Council Advanced Grant and the 2022 Helmholtz Prize in Metrology.

Filipe Almeida

Springer Nature

Filipe studied the influence of the biomechanics of the tumor microenvironment at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, and most recently developed composite biomaterials for the delivery of anticancer drugs at NOVA University of Lisbon. Previously, at Queen Mary University of London, where he obtained his PhD in 2015, where he studied how skin cells respond to their microenvironment by using advanced microfabricated biomaterials, and developed micropatterned surfaces for high-content imaging and drug screening. Filipe’s interests span mechanobiology, biomechanics, cellular imaging, tissue engineering, nanotheranostics and cancer therapies. Filipe joined Nature Biomedical Engineering in November 2021 and he is based in Berlin.

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