November 2025
Research
Seminars and research workshops
Handbook for the History of Quantum Optics
This workshop, organized by Gautier Depambour, Sara Ducci, and Florent Baboux, focuses on the history of quantum optics — a theoretical and experimental field that emerged in the 1960s, initially centered on fundamental questions (free radiation, matter-radiation interaction, foundations of quantum mechanics), and from the 1980s onward oriented towards applications, giving rise to numerous quantum technologies (cryptography, simulation, metrology, teleportation, quantum computing). The objective is to bring together key actors to prepare a collective book (likely with Oxford University Press), stimulate exchanges, collect oral history testimonies, and define complementary chapters.
Size control and density regulation in living cells – mechanisms and physiological impact of crowding homeostasis
In recent years, the integration of physical chemistry concepts has profoundly changed molecular biology, but the regulation of crowding (density homeostasis) remains poorly understood — it is disrupted in cancer and aging. A key question is how biomass production is coordinated with the expansion of cell volume to maintain constant crowding and how variations in crowding affect physiology. The seminar organized by Matthieu Piel aims to bring together multidisciplinary experts and model organisms to exchange ideas, confront their perspectives, and develop testable models on the regulation and effects of crowding.
Research residency
Historical cryptography and artificial intelligence in the service of modern texts
Camille Desenclos
Frequently, historians are confronted with encrypted documents whose decipherment has not been preserved. Aside from a few rare cases (associated cipher tables), they remain helpless in the face of these documents whose content remains sealed to them. To address this need, international projects and occasional collaborations between historians and cryptographers have been carried out in recent years. Both, however, face several difficulties: the absence of AI methods capable of transcribing the thousands of pages encrypted with glyphs unique to each writer, the loss of modern deciphering techniques, and the difficulty of establishing collaborations between the humanities and hard sciences. This stay is therefore intended to be the starting point for connecting the expertise of researchers from four fields – cryptography, history, AI, and linguistics – in order to decrypt historical encrypted documents, sometimes left dormant for several centuries. [learn more]
Creation
Exhibition
Our 2015 Photography Prize winner, Sophie Zénon, will exhibit her project “The Humus of the World” from November 22, 2025, to March 8, 2026, at the Château d’Eau in Toulouse. Works will be loaned by the Foundation for this event. The opening reception will take place on November 21. [learn more]
Author’s residency
Cédric Dentant
This writing project aims to tell the story of plants without speaking on their behalf, in order to encounter them differently. Their way of existing, very different from ours, seems almost extraterrestrial. To describe them, the author therefore chooses to venture into the extraordinary, into extreme areas such as high altitudes, where humans do not live, but where plants thrive. [learn more]
Photography Residency
Éponine Momenceau
Éponine Momenceau works on trace and memory. Her project focuses on attempting to capture the experience of time in an image. It is a work on the decomposition of time through the recording of very short video image sequences, with the aim of shaping a body of images in the form of a series. [learn more]
Dana Cojbuc
The series En Levko will continue her poetic and artistic research, taking as its starting point the mineral and lunar landscape of the village of Volax on the island of Tinos in Greece. This work will allow her to deepen her explorations of white, considered in its entirety as color, presence, and essence. [learn more]