Prize Recipient

Jacques Prost
UMR168, CNRS-Curie Institute

"For influential contributions to the statistical physics of nonequilibrium phenomena and applications to soft matter and biological systems."

After graduating from ENS Saint Cloud, (Paris), Jacques Prost earned his Ph.D. in 1973 from Bordeaux University (France). After a postdoc at Harvard University, he joined CNRS first in Bordeaux and then at ESPCI Paris (1989-1995) where P.G. de Gennes asked him to create a theoretical physics lab. He then moved to the Curie Institute (1995-2003) where he set up the "physics-biology interface". He then became head of ESPCI (2003-2013) and Singapore distinguished professor (2014-2020), keeping simultaneously his research activity at the Curie Institute and visiting appointment at MPIPKS Dresden. After working on phase transitions in Liquid crystals, he got interested in the physics of life and out of equilibrium systems with seminal contributions on molecular motors, the statistics of active membranes, the notion of Hopf bifurcation in hearing, the generalized hydrodynamics of active systems, cell and tissue dynamics, fields action on tissues and a generalization of the fluctuation dissipation theorem to Markovian dynamics. Jacques Prost was awarded among others, the CNRS silver medal, the P. Ricard "grand prix" of the French physical Society, the Wenner Gren lecture (Stockholm), the Del Duca "European grand prix" of the French Academy of Sciences, the Beverly and Raymond Sackler prize in Biophysics, the physics prize Dresden. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences.