Majed Chergui


Majed Chergui is a Swiss and French physicist specialized in ultrafast dynamics of light-induced processes. He is a Honorary professor of the EPFL and the Université de Lausanne. He was founding director of the Lausanne Centre for Ultrafast Science at the EPFL between 2016 and 2021.
He is now project leader at Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste.

Early life and education

Majed Chergui was born in Casablanca in 1956 and grew up in Algeria and Lebanon. He received his BSc in Physics and Mathematics from Chelsea College in 1977, his Master's degree in atomic and molecular physics from the Université Paris-Sud in 1978 and his PhD from the same University in 1981. In 1986, he received his Habilitation under the supervision of Venkataraman Chandrasekharan at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. Between 1987 and 1989, he was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in the group of Professor Nikolaus Schwentner at the Institute for Experimental Physics of the Free University of Berlin.

Career

M. Chergui was assistant Lecturer of Physics at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord between 1980 and 1982, then research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique between 1982 and 1989. 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 as Professor of Chemistry and Physics and head of the Laboratory of Ultrafast Spectroscopy at EPFL's School of Basic Sciences. He founded the 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.
He has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Chemical Physics between 2009 and 2014. He then founded the journal "" and was its Editor-in-Chief between 2014 and 2020.
He is mostly known for pioneering developments in ultrafast X-ray spectroscopies, and ultrafast multidimensional deep-ultraviolet spectroscopy, which he utilised to solve scientific questions in Physical Chemistry and in Materials Science.

Honours and awards

He is also Fellow of:
the Royal Society of Chemistry 2014, the European Physical Society 2015, the American Physical Society 2015, The Optical Society of America 2016, American Crystallographic Association 2018, the 2021, The World Academy of Sciences 2022, as well as Foreign Correspondent of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences since 2018.