Michel Davier

Michel Davier (born 6 March 1942) is a French physicist. Graduate of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud (science), he was Director of the Laboratory of Linear Accelerator in Orsay from 1985 to 1994. Winner of the Gentner-Kastler Prize in 1994, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences (Physics section) in 1996. He was appointed senior member of the Institut universitaire de France in 1991 for a five-year term, renewed in 1996. He has been teaching physics since 1975 at the Paris-Sud University at the Centre scientifique d'Orsay. Originally from Ambérieu-en-Bugey (Ain), Michel Davier studied at the Lycée Lalande in Bourg-en-Bresse, at the École Normale d'instituteurs in the same city, and then at the École Normale d'instituteurs in Lyon. After a year of preparatory classes at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris in 1960–61, he entered the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud where he obtained a degree in physics and chemistry. Admitted to the first agrégation in physics in 1965, he chose to focus on higher education and research in elementary particle physics. Having joined the Laboratory of Linear Accelerator (LAL) founded in Orsay by the École Normale Supérieure as an assistant at the University of Paris-Sud, he did his doctoral work on the photoproduction of vector mesons at Stanford University in California at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), which he defended in 1969 in Orsay. After a two-year stay at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, he joined Stanford University and SLAC as an assistant professor, then associate professor in 1973 where he conducted hadronic diffusion experiments. He returned to France in 1975 to take up the professorship left vacant by the untimely death of André Lagarrigue. He launched a research program on electron-positron annihilation at the highest energies available at the PETRA collider installed at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg.