The Academy of Sciences Honors Five Scientists from École Polytechnique Laboratories

A professor at École Polytechnique and director of the “Visual Worlds: Temporal Analysis, Animation, and Authoring” (Vista) team at LIX, Vicky Kalogeiton studies how to combine images, videos, text, and sound to create artificial intelligence models capable of understanding and generating visual content more efficiently and in a more controllable manner. Her work aims to achieve better results with less data, fewer computations, and less user interaction, in order to make these technologies more accessible. She is also the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant 2026 and the CNRS Bronze Medal 2026. She is affiliated to the Hi! Paris Center.

More than an honour, I see this prize as a responsibility: to my team, to the students who come next, and to making visual AI efficient and accessible to all.

An assistant professor at Sorbonne Université and a member of the LPP, Pauline Simon studies turbulence in heliospheric plasmas, that is, in the space environment dominated by the solar wind. In particular, she has proposed a model for the turbulent heating rate of these low-collision, magnetized plasmas that accounts for pressure anisotropy. Her research combines theoretical approaches with analyses of data from numerical simulations and satellite observations.

This award, which I am honored to receive, recognizes my early-career work. Today, I am delighted to continue this work as an assistant professor at the Plasma Physics Laboratory and at Sorbonne Université.

An assistant professor at École Polytechnique, researcher at the IPVF, and Deputy Director of the Energy4Climate (E4C) Center, Daniel Suchet focuses on high-efficiency concepts for solar energy conversion, particularly hot-carrier solar cells. He is specifically interested in robust conversion strategies capable of maintaining their performance under non-ideal conditions. At the intersection of thermodynamics and semiconductor physics, he studies devices using photoluminescence, analyzing the light emitted by these objects when illuminated.

My research on photovoltaics lies at the intersection of various disciplines, as well as between fundamental questions and practical applications, and between laboratory science and societal challenges. I am particularly honored to receive the Yvan Peychès Prize, which highlights the importance of building these bridges.

Martin Leguil, a Monge professor at École Polytechnique and a mathematician at the CMLS, works on chaotic dynamical systems, particularly hyperbolic systems. His research aims to understand long-term behavior by studying geometric structures and invariant measures. In particular, he studies the classification of systems based on periodic data and the properties of certain invariant measures that describe the statistical behavior of the majority of trajectories.

This award recognizes our collaboration with Davi Obata of Brigham Young University. It will enable us to continue our research by facilitating travel between France and the United States, as well as exchanges with our co-authors Sébastien Alvarez (in Uruguay) and Bruno Santiago (in Brazil).

A professor at École Polytechnique and a theoretical physicist at the CPHT, as well as vice chair of the physics department at École Polytechnique, Silke Biermann is a specialist in condensed matter physics. In particular, she studies so-called “strongly correlated” materials, in which interactions between electrons give rise to complex and exotic quantum states. She seeks to understand and describe, from first principles, the remarkable properties of these materials by combining analytical approaches and numerical methods. Her work contributes to a better understanding of the quantum phenomena at work in complex materials and opens up new possibilities for their use.