Research federations
Research Animation Federations (FRA) are groups of research institutions focused on a common scientific theme. This collaboration enables them to coordinate their scientific activities, pool their resources, enhance their visibility, and implement a shared scientific strategy.
Below are the research federations of the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
Chemistry
Infranalytics is a French research infrastructure established in 2022, bringing together state-of-the-art analytical equipment to study the relationships between structure and properties in various scientific fields. It provides high-performance tools for researchers and industry professionals, thereby contributing to advances in health, the environment, energy, and innovative materials. Infranalytics also trains early-career researchers and fosters national and international collaboration.
Director: Carine VAN HEIJENOORT
Deputy Director: Hervé VEZIN, Carlos AFONSO
The RS2E—Network for Electrochemical Energy Storage—is a French research and technology transfer network dedicated to various energy storage devices: rechargeable batteries, supercapacitors, and alternative technologies designed for a wide range of applications (electric vehicles, portable electronics, and storage of electricity from renewable sources).
Director: Patrice Simon
Deputy Director: MORCRETTE Mathieu, LABERTY Christel
The Federation aims to address several major challenges: advancing the science of photoemission spectroscopy, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, improving training and community engagement, strengthening ties with the socio-economic sector, and coordinating the acquisition and development of state-of-the-art equipment. This interdisciplinary structure, involving the Institutes of Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering Sciences, is committed to promoting innovation, collaboration, and international visibility in this strategic field
Director: Hervé MARTINEZ
Deputy Director: TEJEDA GALA Antonie, DOMENICHINI Bruno
The Paris Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry (IP2CT) (FR2622) is a joint Sorbonne University/CNRS research federation. It brings together the scientific activities of three laboratories: LCT, the Laboratory of Theoretical Chemistry (UMR7616); LCPMR, the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry—Matter and Radiation (UMR7614); and MONARIS, Molecules and Nanomaterials: Reactivity, Interactions, and Spectroscopies (UMR8233). All of the scientific topics addressed by the federation fall within the fields of physical chemistry, theoretical chemistry, and atomic and molecular physics. Theoretical chemistry is, without a doubt, the unifying field.
Director: Ludovic BELLOT-GURLET
Deputy Director: n/a
Engineering
F2M-msp is a federative research organization under the supervision of the CNRS and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers (ENSAM). It comprises 15 academic laboratories in the fields of materials mechanics, structures, and processes. It brings together 10 educational institutions (engineering schools and universities), 4 research organizations, and 1 industrial partner, representing approximately 600 researchers, engineers, and technicians. Through scientific coordination, it helps strengthen community cohesion, encourages the creation and sharing of platforms, and organizes exchanges so that researchers from the laboratories can collectively generate proposals on specific topics.
Physics
The Chocodyn Federation brings together members of the community interested in materials subjected to very high strain rates (>10⁴ s⁻¹) and high pressures generated by laser pulses, electrical generators, or launchers, as well as in detonics as applied to materials, structures, and processes. It comprises 19 research groups and approximately 100 researchers studying loading conditions and their effects across a range from a few bars to several hundred kbars, on time scales ranging from a few ns to ms. The corresponding strain rates range from 10³ s⁻¹ to 10⁶ s⁻¹.
The main objectives of establishing the Federation are to coordinate, support, and promote this research community.
Director: Laurent BERTHE
Deputy Director: Jean-Pierre GUIN
The FRIF's activities focus primarily on theoretical and experimental physics of particles and astroparticles, gravity, and cosmology. The goal of this federation is to increase collaboration among laboratories and foster scientific activity by organizing joint seminars, visits by foreign researchers, (post)doctoral-level courses, and research workshops.
Director: Benjamin FUKS
Deputy Director: N/A
EMIR&A is the French network of accelerators dedicated to the study of the irradiation of materials and molecules and/or their analysis using ion beams. It comprises 15 ion and electron accelerators coupled with in situ instruments offering unique capabilities, installed on 11 platforms spread across 6 sites (Caen, Orléans, Orsay, Palaiseau, Paris, Saclay). EMIR&A’s facilities complement one another in terms of accelerated particles, available energies, and associated instrumentation.
EMIR&A brings together scientific communities studying condensed matter using ion or electron accelerators and fosters new collaborations by sharing these instruments and the associated expertise. It fosters scientific exchange, maximizes the value of equipment and practices, and optimizes resources on a national scale. The networked platforms offer a single portal to welcome external users, strengthen ties among the platforms and with users, and promote their development.
EMIR&A provides the national and international scientific community with access to beamtime through a wide range of high-performance, complementary accelerators for research in the physics and chemistry of materials and interfaces.
Director: Nathalie MONCOFFRE
Deputy Director: Marie-France BARTHE, Clara GRYGIEL
The FERMI Federation was established in 2015 with the aim of bringing together laboratories in the Île-de-France region whose activities include metallurgy, and of identifying synergies among the various public laboratories and EPST or EPIC institutions.
One of the federation’s objectives is to promote metallurgy initiatives in the Île-de-France region.
The FERMI Federation is organized into three thematic areas, each of which encompasses several research topics:
- Area 1: Design and formulation of new alloys
- Area 2: Processing and forming
- Area 3: Deformation and durability under service conditions
Director: Ivan GUILLOT
Deputy Director: Mikael PERRUT
The main goal of establishing the FIRST-TF Research Federation is to ensure the long-term sustainability of efforts to coordinate and support the national time-frequency community. Particular attention is being paid to ensuring continuity between the FIRST-TF Research Federation and the implementation of the FIRST-TF Labex.
Director: Yann KERSALE
Deputy Director: Luca LORINI
The Federation has defined an ambitious vision aimed at revitalizing and enriching the plasma science community. This vision, structured around six strategic pillars, seeks to unify and advance plasma science in all its diversity, from basic research to practical applications. It emphasizes interdisciplinarity, innovation in addressing societal challenges, support for education, collaboration between researchers and industry, the community’s visibility, and geographic mobility. The goal is to create a dynamic and interconnected research ecosystem capable of addressing future challenges in a variety of fields, ranging from agriculture to renewable energy, including medicine and the environment.
Director: Andrea CIARDI
Deputy Director: n/a
The Federation’s mission is to coordinate research conducted in France in the field of magnetic confinement fusion, within the framework of the ITER project and the accompanying program supported by the European Union (Euratom).
Director: Yann CAMENEN
Deputy Director: n/a
The goal is to improve our understanding and prediction of the physical mechanisms involved, to promote transdisciplinarity—the primary source of innovation—and to raise our profile at the national and international levels. The priority was to establish a clear framework in order to formalize a national structure for the community and a comprehensive vision for its activities, which could potentially draw on regional specificities.
Director: Cyril CALIOT
Deputy Director: Christophe MENEZO
Earth, Environment, Biodiversity
The FIRE Research Federation (Île-de-France Federation for Environmental Research) was established in January 2007. Its primary mission is to promote interdisciplinary research in the field of environmental sciences throughout the Île-de-France region. Its unifying mission focuses primarily on research concerning continental surfaces (watersheds and river systems, lakes and reservoirs, agricultural plots and forests, small agricultural regions, and landscapes), their interfaces with underlying groundwater, coastal marine areas, and the atmosphere, in relation to territories and human activities. The FIRE federation brings together 21 laboratories under various governing bodies: Sorbonne University, UPEC, CNRS, INRAE, MNHN, CEA, EPHE, and AgroParisTech.
Director: Naoise Nunan
Deputy Director: n/a
The primary objective of the Research Federation is to develop an interdisciplinary, ecosystem-based approach to the biology of oceanic biomes on a global scale. The teams involved in the GOSEE Research Federation, in collaboration with the Tara Ocean Foundation (FTO), have conducted five major global ocean expeditions and have continued this work through the “Tara Oceans” initiative since 2009. These large-scale sampling campaigns employed a common, pan-ecosystemic protocol targeting the entire spectrum of life—from viruses to animals—as well as different levels of biological organization—from genomes to organisms—to assess life in marine plankton, corals, and plastics. The massive eco-morpho-genetic datasets produced are the most comprehensive to date for these ecosystems; they are homogeneous and comparable, and today undoubtedly constitute the largest archives for the study of ocean ecology and evolution at the ecosystem level. The FR encourages the exploration of these datasets using advanced imaging systems, meta-omics, bioinformatics, systems biology, and modeling approaches to test key hypotheses regarding the origin, increasing complexity, and ecological dynamics of life within a global eco-evolutionary framework. In addition, FR teams, including the FTO, are jointly developing and adapting ocean sampling protocols for the ongoing holistic exploration of ocean ecosystems at critical spatiotemporal scales, aboard Tara and other platforms. The FR’s overall goal is to integrate biology into eco-evolutionary and Earth system models in order to predict how the ocean will respond to changes and feedbacks, thereby enabling better management of our environment.
Director: GUIDI Lionel
Deputy Director: WINCKER Patrick, DE VARGAS Colomban
The Villefranche Institute of the Sea (IMEV) is one of three marine campuses within the Faculty of Science and Engineering that give Sorbonne University a unique position in the national landscape of biology and marine sciences. The three marine stations in Banyuls, Roscoff, and Villefranche, united within the national infrastructure EMBRC France, provide the national scientific community with access to marine ecosystems and model organisms. The IMEV also provides observational resources and analytical platforms to the site’s two joint research units (UMRs), the LOV and the LBDV. IMEV is also responsible for coastal environment observation services (SOMLIT) and for monitoring the abundance and composition of plankton communities for the French and international scientific communities.
Director: CHRISTIANS Elisabeth
Deputy Director: n/a
L'Observatoire Océanologique de Banyuls (OOB) est une fédération de recherche qui regroupe quatre unités scientifiques pour étudier les interactions biotiques, les rythmes marins et la toxicologie marine. Situé sur la côte rocheuse du Roussillon, l'OOB a contribué à la création de la première réserve naturelle marine française et accueille chaque année de nombreux étudiants et chercheurs. Ses missions incluent la recherche, l'observation, la formation, l'accueil, la médiation scientifique et le développement économique.
Directeur : DESDEVISES Yves
Directeur adjoint : LARTAUD Franck
Founded in 1872, the Roscoff Biological Station (SBR), located on the northern coast of Brittany, is an internationally recognized center for research and training in marine biology and ecology. It is affiliated with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Sorbonne University (SU).
Director: Catherine Boyen
Deputy Director: n/a
The Nanosats Federation aims to promote major scientific advances in Earth and Space Sciences through the use of nanosatellites. By capitalizing on the wealth of experience of each partner and their human and technical resources, the Federation aims to boost the dynamism of the scientific community in this field by advancing scientific and technical objectives, addressing the challenges of NewSpace, and uniting and developing the nanosatellite community in the Île-de-France region.
Director: Coralie NEINER
Deputy Director: N/A
