| 1977-81 | Student at Ecole normale supérieure |
| 1981 | Master thesis under the supervision of C. Cohen-Tannoudji on resonance fluorescence |
| 1981-82 | Internship
in Alain Aspect's team on the violation of Bell's
inequality |
| 1982-92 | Researcher at CNRS |
| 1986 | PhD thesis (thèse d'état) under the supervision of Claude Cohen-Tannoudji on light-matter interaction |
| 1989-2002 | Associate Professor at Ecole polytechnique |
| 1991 | Guest scientist at NIST Gaithersburg (USA) |
| 1992-2012 | Director of research at CNRS |
| 2003-2016 | Professor at Ecole polytechnique |
| 2010 | Guest researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge, UK) |
| 2012
- |
Professor at Collège de France |
| 1988-91 | Member of the French Conseil Supérieur des Universités |
| 1990 | Organiser (with Jean-Michel Raimond) of the Les Houches summer school "Fundamental Systems in Quantum Optics" |
| 1995-2000 | Director of the graduate studies program in Quantum Physics at ENS |
| 1997-2000 | Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters (Atomic Physics and Optics) |
| 2000 | Organiser (with Alain Aspect) of the Cargèse Summer school "Bose-Einstein condensates and Atom Lasers" |
| 2000-2001 | Member of the board of the department Physical Sciences and Mathematics of CNRS |
| 2001-2013 | Vice-Director of Laboratoire Kastler Brossel |
| 2001-2006 | Director of the Les Houches Physics school |
| 2008-2011 | Member of the Editorial Board of Physical Review A |
| 2009-2015 | Associate Editor of Reviews of Modern Physics |
| 2012 |
Organizer
(with Frédéric Chevy) of the Sumer School associated
with ICAP2012 |
| 2014-2018 |
Member
of the Scientific Advisory Board of CNRS |
| 2019 |
President of the scientific committee of the congress of the French Physical Society (SFP) |
| 2004 | Elected
member at the French Academy of Sciences |
| 2009 | Elected member at
the European Academy of Sciences |
| 2010 | Visiting Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge |
| 2011 |
Elected member at
the Academia Europaea |
| 2013 |
Fellow of the
Optical Society of America |
| 2013 |
Fellow of the
American Physical Society |
| 2018 |
Elected member of
the American Philosophical Society |
| 2020 |
Elected member of
the National Academy of Sciences (USA) |
| 1977 |
Eugène et Léon Bloch
prize (Fondation de France) |
| 1987 | Gustave Ribaud Prize of the French Academy of Sciences |
| 1992 |
Mergier Bourdeix Prize of the French Academy of Sciences |
| 2000 |
Jean Ricard Prize of the French Physical Society |
| 2009 |
Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences |
| 2010 |
Prix des Trois Physiciens (Fondation de France) |
| 2012 |
Davisson & Germer Prize of the American Physical Society |
| 2012 |
Max Born Award of the Optical Sociey of America |
| 2017 |
Bose-Einstein condensation prize |
| 2021 |
Jacques Solvay International Chair in
Physics |
| 2021 | CNRS Gold Medal |
| 2023 |
Loeb Lectures at Harvard University |
| 2026 | Alessandro Volta Prize of the European Physics Society |