Research at PSL
A Word from the Dean of Research
PSL must rise to three major challenges facing science today: strengthen international relationships, share research results through knowledge dissemination and education, and, the greatest challenge of all, stimulate cross-disciplinary collaboration and interaction.
Develop international partnerships
PSL actively cultivates international exposure. The university contributes to the circulation of ideas and talent and has created networks of partnerships scaled optimally for rising to the great challenges of today’s world. Agreements signed with the world’s top universities make it possible for PSL researchers and students to conduct state-of-the-art research projects while benefitting from scientific mobility at the highest levels.
Disseminate, transfer, permeate
PSL also places strategic priority on disseminating research results. We facilitate research transfer through patent filings and the creation of spinoffs, and created the PSL Explore platform to provide access to a broad array of research results and output. Furthermore, we place research at the core of all of our education programs, including at the undergraduate level, and particularly at the Master’s and doctoral levels where close to 70% of our student body is active. It is through these initiatives that we are actively working to guide more brilliant young minds toward careers in science.
Create interdisciplinary dialogue
PSL provides priority support to research projects that incorporate a blend of approaches and that foster robust dialogue across disciplines, thereby paving the way toward significant discoveries in the near future. PSL has established several unique methods for eliminating stovepipes, with the necessary flexibility for ensuring an improved response to the fast-paced change and reconfigurations required of cutting-edge research. Our initiatives in this area seek to promote research that is particularly original and innovative and of strategic interest for scientific inquiry and society’s benefit alike.
Lead a dynamic network
Drawing on its research units and the research policies of its schools, and fueled by the ambition of maintaining and strengthening the scientific excellence of these institutions in partnership with leading organizations, PSL places high priority on developing dynamic networks to surpass traditional barriers, better respond to the changing landscape of contemporary science, and rise to the challenges of today’s world.
Focus: Spotlight on the individuals leading research at PSL
Directors of PSL’s Flagship Programs share a few words about the benefits of conducting research at PSL. By highlighting the benefits that they and their teams reap from the ecosystem in which they work, Bruno Goud, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Serge Planes, and Alessandro Stanziani bear witness to the vibrancy that emerges from cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration.


Director of Research, CNRS
Designed to strengthen and expand interface-based biological research, the Q-Life “Institut de Convergence” at PSL is host to an unparalleled concentration of high-level teams comprised of physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and other experts. In all, these are 70 teams working together to achieve a shared goal: develop Q-Life into a worldwide leader in research, teaching and innovation in quantitative biology at all levels of the life sciences.


Director of Studies, EHESS
The “Creative, Cognition, Society” (CCS) IRIS seeks to bring a new approach to the study of the arts by considering creative processes, the cognitive underpinnings of creation, and the social dimension of art. Its originality resides in its strong interdisciplinarity. The desired impact is twofold: remove artificial barriers in aesthetics and build bridges between scientific research and the experiential research specific to the arts. It is our collaborative relationships within PSL that are fueling our advances.


Directeur of research, CNRS
Whether we refer to it as the Anthropocene Era, global change, or climate change, there is no doubt that mankind is changing our planet and changing our environment and the environment of all other species. Assessing, understanding, modeling, and integrating these changes form a challenge that must be solved through an embrace of all disciplines to establish sustainable policies that take into account our societies’ environmental transformations. This is the work we are doing with PSL.


Director of Research, Institut Curie
When I was appointed Junior Group Leader at Institut Curie, I was awarded a PSL-funded start-up grant called “Structuration d’Equipes”, which has allowed me to set up an independent team and has opened the exciting opportunity of expanding my collaborations within the PSL research network, allowing the successful accomplishment of our research.