French physical chemist
Marie-Paule Pileni is a French physical chemist who was born in Tananarive, Madagascar. She is an Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University and a Senior Member, since 1999, and administrator (2004–2011) of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Scientific Achievements
Professor Pileni’s research has been highly interdisciplinary over her entire scientific career. Her accomplishments have conducted to several breakthroughs in nanotechnology. She paved the way to find new physics, chemistry and energy release out of the various nanostructures she developed. Her discoveries over the past thirty years provide various long-term fundamental and technological advances in biomedicine, Solar energy or chip design.
She pioneered the use of colloids as nanoreactor to control inorganic nanocrystals growth processes and to assemble atoms in order to produce nanocrystals with various size and shapes. She demonstrated that nanoreactors can be used to modify chemically macromolecules such as proteins and enzymes opening a new approach to enzyme catalysis.
In addition, she showed that incompressible nanocrystals and coating agents, acting like mechanical springs holding together the nanoreactor, replace atoms and atomic bonds respectively in atomic crystals. She highlighted that collective chemical and physical intrinsic properties emerge from such 3D superlattices called colloid crystals or supracrystals. Some of them are in prefect alignment with atomic crystals.
Moreover, she discovered that the crystalline structure of nanocrystals plays a major role on the chemical and physical properties of both nanocrystals and their assemblies. Such suprastructures dispersed in aqueous solution operate as efficient universal "nanoheaters", a brand-new concept she introduced.
Such control of thermal energy release is one of the major challenges in various research areas related to energy release. She succeeds to self-assemble nanocrystals in tumor cells. Furthermore, such suprastructures target different compartments of the tumor microenvironment and trigger local photothermal damages that are inaccessible for isolated nanocrystals and not predicted by global temperature measurements.
She has always been sensitive to Women in science careers. She trained more than a hundred scientists from all over the world (USA, Asia, Europe), half being women. From 2005 to 2007, she was Vice-President of the Women in Science Committee reporting to the French Minister of Research.
Education and career
She is the daughter of Christophe Pileni, Administrator in Chief of the École nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer, and of Marie-Pasquine Micheletti, President of the French Red Cross. She studied, from 1961 to 1966, at the Maison d'éducation de la Légion d'honneur (school for children of Légion d’Honneur members), then at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (1967–1969) and at the Université Paris-Sud 11 (1970–1972). There she obtained a honors degree in physical chemistry (1968), a Ph.D (1969) and a D.Sc. (thèse du doctorat d’Etat) (1977).
She became a demonstrator (1969–1974), assistant lecturer (1974–1983), associate professor (1983–1990), full professor (1990–1997), and finally distinguished professor (since 1997). She was director, between 1996 and 2000, of the Structure and Reactivity of Interfaces Laboratory (SRI), a Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) joint unit. Since 2004, she has been a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology at Atlanta.[1] In 2000, she created the Laboratoire des Matériaux Mésoscopiques et Nanométriques (LM2N) (Mesoscopic and Nanometric Materials Laboratory).[2]
Along with her research work, she became administrator (2004–2010) of the Institut Universitaire de France IUF (as stated above). Moreover, she was Auditor (1987–88) of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale,[3] Auditor (1989) of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Européenne (European Defense Advanced Studies Institute) and Auditor (1990–91) of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Sécurité Intérieure (Internal Security Advanced Studies Institute) (IHESI now INHESJ).[4]
