Activity Report 2010 - CNRS

OVERVIEW
POST FACE
The Scientific Committee, duly filling its role, proposed recommendations and asked relevant questions in
its report following its last meeting on November 19 th – 20 th 2009.
1. This 2010 activity report attempts to bring answers to most of the items for the form and the
substance. Improvements in methods and in process of selection have been implemented in
response of the non homogeneity of the quality of the recruited students.
Better identifications of the results, comparison with the ERC procedure have been made more
accessible.
2. The achievement of the third goal of the Foundation (as listed below) concerning integration
starts to be more visible and appears also in an unexpected way, stimulated by initiatives,
NanoINNOV and the call for ‘Investissement d’avenir’, which didn’t exist at the beginning of the
Nanosciences Foundation.
3. Fund raising and creation of the prestigious Louis Néel chair require a better identification of the
Foundation with the help of a small brochure containing a dozen of highlights. Initiative to act
along this path has been activated.
4. An additional step forward, envisaged by the Board is to meet the need of a Company to create a
shared Chair of Excellence. The ambition is to convince a Company motivated by relevant
research topics to share the cost of one Chair. The tax discount available for companies investing
in research is presently very appealing.
5. The weakness remains the difficulty to encompass all the calls with enhanced coherency of the
strategic vision. The Foundation intervenes in a very moving landscape, not being the main fund
agency to support groups. It is difficult to pretend to play a prominent role considering the
amount of its resources.
The targets of the Nanosciences Foundation were given by the Ministry of Research, leading to
specific contracts with each founding members. Sadly, ambitions have to be limited by these
frames focused on three (nevertheless not so modest) aspects:
Human resources with a focus on creation of Chairs of Excellence and opening new
sources of recruitment of outstanding PhD students and post-doctoral fellows
Investments to upgrade experimental facilities to the current international level, and
to make them fully shared by the scientific community
To challenge all the laboratories, those dedicated to basic research as well as those
dedicated to R&D, encouraged to achieve a better integration between them.
6. The Foundation has not been known rapidly enough throughout Grenoble and worldwide. The
improvement of the website quality gives robust signals: more visits and a better quality of the
applicants to the PhD program have been noticed these two last years. The 20 successful
laureates of Chair of Excellence came all from top universities and a large part of them plays an
effective role in mixing research groups. Outstanding results, accumulated during three years,
led to the recruitment of three of them on permanent positions at Grenoble.
7. The last comment is to point out the top quality of the results obtained by the young incoming
researchers selected by the two initial calls (2007 & 2008). Boosting the best of the incoming
researchers, full of dynamism, seems mandatory to me. It is the more efficient way to make
them competitive in European and international calls. Once again the characteristic time to judge
the viability of top quality research projects, based on originality and risk, is difficult to be kept
within a couple of years. We may regret to have abandoned such a call which is truly novel out of
“the more of me” line since the laureates are new comers willing to investigate their new ideas.
Grenoble – 1, May 2011
Alain FONTAINE
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