European and international research projects
The extensive network of international collaboration built by the research groups on Institut d'Optique's three campuses leads to an important involvement in European projects, which are a key part of the project-based funding for its three research centers: five ERC grants holders, almost thirty FP7 or H2020 projects in research and researchers mobilities (Marie Curie), as well as funding from European Space Agency, an EURAMET action and an EURIPIDES action.
For the Laboratoire Charles Fabry, this amounts to 40% of project-based funding.
Outside of Europe, IOGS is a partner of a International associated laboratory in Canada (LUMAQ, with Laval University in Quebec), and is in close cooperation with an International mixed unit from CNRS (LN2 lab, with Sherbrooke University in Quebec, whose co-director is a reasearcher from Laboratoire Charles Fabry; three cotutelle PhD have been set up so far); it participates to a DARPA action (USA).
Institut d'Optique's fame is supported by several prestigious awards and prizes: recently, the international gold medal Niels Bohr of the Danish Academy of Engineers and the UNESCO Niels Bohr medal, the Balzan Prize and the Ives Medal distinction/Jarus Quinn Prize from the Optical Society of America, the Tommassonni Award from the University of Rome for Alain Aspect, the Léon Brillouin Award from the Société Française d'Optique (SFO) for Philippe Grangier, the Servant Award from the French Academy of Sciences for Jean-Jacques Greffet, the European Frequency and Time Forum Award for Giorgio Santarelli.
Members from Institut d'Optique regularly take part in the organization of international events in their fields, and in optics/photonics in general. Among others, can be mentioned the presidence of the CLEO Europe 2016 conference (1800 communications, in Munich) and the hosting by Institut d'Optique's Bordeaux campus of the General Congress of the Société Française d'Optique (550 participants, in 2016).
The proportion of international students among the PhD students is high; it benefits from European funding (master Erasmus Mundus, Marie-Curie networks), opening the recruitment outside of Europe too. For instance, for Laboratoire Charles Fabry, 17% of the PhD students have obtained their master degree abroad (10% in another European country, 7% outside of Europe).
Partner institutions are selected on their international exposure and the complementarity of their specializations in regards with those of Institut d'Optique, in order to develop fruitful collaborations; they are numerous (several tens of partner institutions for the current cofinanced projects) and for a part, they can vary depending on the research projects lifespan. We can mention the long-term life of several key partnerships: for instance, thanks to our constant relations with the international mixed unit LN2 in Canada, 3 double-supervision PhD thesis (cotutelles) have been launched so far. We can also mention 2 other PhD cotutelles (with Durham and NIST) and several senior researchers visiting period at Sandia Laboratories and Livermore Laboratories, in UC Berkeley and Princeton University. Among our long-term research relations, we can mention also the Max Planck Institutes of Garching and Erlangen, the universities of Hanover, Innsbruck, Delft, Joensuu, Modena, Southampton, Durham, Université Laval in Québec, Peking University, Nankai University in Tianjin.
Researchers from Institut d'Optique are regularly invited to participate in scientific committees and evaluations abroad or in international organizations: we can mention the scientific councils of EURAMET, ERC, a Max Planck Institute.