Martin Pertenais has obtained an optical engineer degree from the prestigious Engineer School Institut d’Optique Graduate School (IOGS) in Paris and a Master in photonics from the University of Jena. He then undertook a PhD thesis in instrumentation for astrophysics at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse and at the Paris Observatory on "Stellar UV and Visible spectropolarimetry from space".
This allowed him in particular to successfully lead the Arago Payload consortium and to innovate in new technologies for spectropolarimetry.
The PhD thesis of Martin Pertenais was conducted at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse and at the Paris Observatory in Meudon, with a degree delivered by the Université Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier, under the supervision of Coralie Neiner and Pascal Petit.
After his PhD thesis, he moved on a position at DLR as the Optical System Engineer for PLATO. In parallel, he keeps working on new spectropolarimeter designs and co-supervises a PhD student on this topic for the NASA mission LUVOIR.
MERAC Prizes
FONDATION MERAC (Mobilising European Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology) is a non-profit foundation started in 2012 with headquarters in Switzerland to recognize and support young European astronomers. There are yearly three MERAC Prizes awarded by the EAS.
The prizes of 20’000 € are for each of the three categories:
- Theoretical Astrophysics,
- Observational Astrophysics,
- New Technologies (Instrumental/Computational).
The prizes alternate by year for:
- Best Early Career Researcher Prizes (on odd years),
- Best Doctoral Thesis Prizes (on even years).