Dr. Benoit Neichel

Dr. Benoit Neichel (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille) got his PhD in 2008, from the Paris VII University. During his PhD he worked at the Observatoire de Paris on Integral Field Spectroscopy observations of distant galaxies. In parallel, he worked at ONERA on Wide Field Adaptive Optics (WFAO) systems and derived the first application of this technique for extragalactic observations on Extremely Large Telescopes. After his PhD, he worked at the Gemini-South telescope for 4.5 years. He acted as Instrument Scientist for the GeMS instrument, which is the first WFAO system implemented on an 8m telescope and offered to the astronomical community. In 2013, he was granted a “retour post-doc” ANR program that he developed at LAM. He also took the responsibility of deputy-PI for HARMONI – the first light Integral Field Spectrograph for the European ELT. In 2016 he got a permanent scientist position at CNRS, and since 2019 is leading the R&D group of LAM.