Paul Lecoq
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland
Physics | L26
Paul Lecoq has received his diploma as Engineer in Physics Instrumentation at the Ecole Polytechnique de Grenoble in 1972, under the leadership of Nobel Laureate Louis Néel. After two years of work at the Nuclear Physics laboratory of the University of Montreal, Canada, he got his PhD in Nuclear Physics in 1974. Since then, he has been working at CERN in 5 major international experiments on particle physics, one of them led by Nobel Laureate Samuel Ting. His action on detector instrumentation, and particularly on heavy inorganic scintillator materials has received a strong support from the Nobel Laureate Georges Charpak. He has been the technical coordinator of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at CERN, which played an important role in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Paul Lecoq is the founder of the CERN-based international Crystal Clear collaboration regrouping 31 institutes and companies worldwide contributing to the development of scintillator science. He has also created the SCINT conference series in 1991, which gathers every second year the international community working on fundamental aspects, production technologies and applications of scintillators.
Member of a number of advisory committees and of international Societies he has been the promoter in 2002 of the CERIMED initiative (European Center for Research Research in Medical Imaging, installed in Marseille) for networking physics and medicine in the field of medical imaging.
He has been elected in 2008 member of the European Academy of Sciences and in 2017 head of the Physics division of the Academy.
He has been awarded an ERC advanced grant in 2013 by the European Research Council. He has been elevated in 2015 in USA to the fellow grade at IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology. He has received in 2019 the IEEE NPSS Merit Award.
Since August 2019 he is CEO of the company Multiwave Metacrystal SA, based in Switzerland: https://metacrystal.ch
In 2020 he has got a position of Distinguished Professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain).
In Feb. 2023 he has been nominated Dortor Honoris Causa of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain).