Jean-Marc Fournier
Short biography:
Jean-Marc Fournier spent most of his career oscillating between Academia and industry,
and also between the United States of America and Europe. He is one of the inventors of
a new form of matter, discovered when he was heading the Optical Structures Laboratory
at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. He is presently Invited Professor at École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
Detailed biography:
Jean-Marc Fournier received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Besançon, France, in
1970. He worked at CNRS until 1976, applying statistics and optical techniques to handwriting
analysis and to appraisal of the age of ancient manuscripts.
In 1976 he moved to America to join the group of Coherent Optics at Virginia Tech.
He worked in holographic display, first in France (1976 and 1978), later in Hawai (1979),
achieving a record with the world largest size hologram, a holographic image of the Venus de
Milo. He joined Steve Benton’s laboratory at Polaroid in 1979 and worked there until 1981.
From 1982 to 2003, Jean-Marc Fournier headed the Optical Structure Laboratory at the Rowland
Institute at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an institution which he joined when it was
first founded by Edwin Land. He is a member of the team who discovered “Optical Binding”, a
very long range force due to exchange of photons between particles bathed in intense
electromagnetic fields.
He has been Visiting Scientist in many European laboratories and Visiting Professor at several
European Universities.
His areas of concentration include structural colors, ultra-high resolution photosensitive
materials, Lippmann interferential color photography, holography, detection of very small phase
shifts by interference microscopy, diffractive optics, and optical manipulation of micron size
objects.
He is presently Invited Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute, where he works on
massively parallel optical trapping for biological applications.