Dr Jean Christophe

Dr Jean-Christophe P. Gabriel is one of CEA’s Research Director, the highest research position in CEA, in the field of Nanoscience. He is also currently a visiting Professor at NTU where he serves as co-director of the NTU Singapore CEA Alliance for Research in Circular Economy (SCARCE). He first joined the French Alternative Energy and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in 2007. There, he was CEA/LETI institute’s “Beyond CMOS” program manager as well as the business director of the academic- industry Caltech – LETI alliance, which led to the creation of the Startup Apix Technology (apixanalytics.com). From 2009 to 2016, he became deputy director of CEA’s Nanoscience program (budget: 1 M€/year). In parallel, from 2013 to 2018, he was co-principal investigator of the REE-CYCLE advanced ERC project (2013-2018), that aimed at developing new rare earth extraction/recycling processes, at least 10 times more efficient that current liquid-liquid extraction processes. In this REE-CYCLE laboratory in Grenoble, created in 2014, he was developing integrated microfluidic lab-on-chip that enable much faster exploration of multidimensional phase diagrams of complex fluids. Such lab-on-chip devices integrate various sensors as well as characterizations methods (such as FTIR in hollow waveguides, or Xray fluorescence).

Former student at the “Ecole Normale Supérieure” in Paris, he received his Ph. D. from Orsay’s University and his Habilitation from Joseph Fourier’s University in Grenoble. His career is a mixed academic – industrial one. He indeed started his career at CNRS (4 years at Jean Rouxel Institute, IMN, Nantes) followed by 6 years in the Californian startup Nanomix (nano.com) where he was one of the first employee. In this Berkeley spinoff he helped in the technology transfer of nanomaterials and carbon nanotubes technologies, helped raised $34 million of venture capital money and with his team was the first to put an integrated nanotube based electronic device on the market (a hydrogen sensor, in 2005).

Dr Jean-Christophe has published more than 60 papers in international peer reviewed journal and is co-inventor on more than 50 patents and patent applications, many of them dealing with nanomaterials, carbon nanotubes and graphene (~8400 citations).