Nathalie Picqué

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. 

Nathalie Picqué was the Science Breakthrough in the Physical Sciences category at the Science Summit in 2022.