Nicolas Grandjean

Nicolas Grandjean was born in Dijon, France, and is a French and Swiss citizen. He studied at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and the Université Nice-Sophia-Antipolis. In 1991, he joined the Solid-State Physics and Solar Energy Laboratory, a division of the French National Center for Scientific Research where he studied semiconductor nanostructures. By 1994 he obtained his Ph.D. Later on, as a senior research fellow, he worked at the Research Center for Heteroepitaxy and its Applications, a division of CNRS in Sophia Antipolis.

In 2004, he became a tenure-track professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne becoming a director of the Laboratory of Advanced Semiconductors for Photonics and Electronics where he still serves.^[2] He was promoted Full Professor in 2010.^[3] From 2012 to 2016, he was the director of the Institute of Condensed Matter.^[4] Since 2019, he is a board member of Riber,^[5] a world's leading supplier of Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) products.

In January 2025, he was appointed Associate Vice-President for Education at EPFL.^[6]

In 1999, he along with his colleagues, have discovered that combining gallium nitride (GaN) and quantum dots (QDs) into aluminum nitride (AIN) matrix, produces a glowing white light.^[7] In 2006, his group and colleagues at the University of Southampton reported polariton lasing at room-temperature.^[8][9]