Majed Chergui

Majed Chergui obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Mathematics from Chelsea College (London) and his Master’s degree in Atomic and Molecular physics from the Université Paris-Sud (Orsay, now Université Paris-Saclay) in 1978, then his PhD from the same University in 1981. From 1987 till 1993, he worked at the Institute for Experimental Physics of the Free University of Berlin, first as a postdoc, then as senior research assistant. In 1993 he was appointed full professor of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Lausanne, where he stayed until 2003, to move to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as Professor of Chemistry and Physics and head of the Laboratory of Ultrafast Spectroscopy at EPFL’s School of Basic Sciences. He founded the Lausanne Centre for Ultrafast Science (LACUS) at the EPFL in 2016 and was its director until 2021. In 2022, he retired and became Honorary Professor of the EPFL and group leader at the Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste (Italy).

He was Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Physics (Elsevier) between 2009 and 2014, and then became the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Structural Dynamics” (AIP Publishing) until 2020.

He is mostly known for pioneering developments in ultrafast (picosecond-femtosecond) X-ray spectroscopies, and ultrafast multidimensional deep-ultraviolet spectroscopy, which he utilised to solve scientific questions in Physical (Bio)Chemistry and in Materials Science.

Majed Chergui received numerous awards, such as the Rognlie Award 2023 (American Crystallographic Association), the Ahmed Zewail Award 2021(American Chemical Society), the Liversidge Award 2019 (Royal Society of Chemistry), the Earle K. Plyler Award 2015 (American Physical Society), the Edward Stern Prize 2015 (International X-ray Absorption Society), the Humboldt Research Award 2010 and the Kuwait Prize for Physics 2009, to name a few.

He is also Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) 2014 (UK), the European Physical Society (EPS) 2015, the American Physical Society (APS) 2015 (USA), The Optical Society of America 2016 (USA), American Crystallographic Association (ACA) 2018 (USA), the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc) 2021, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) 2022, as well as Foreign Correspondent of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences since 2018.