Discreet, Claude Grison has the effective gesture and verb. With her everything is streamlined, ready to ward off resistance. “Ecology and chemistry have become so inseparable to me that I present myself as an ecochemist”she smiles from the Bio-inspired Chemistry and Ecological Innovations laboratory (Chimeco) that she runs in Montpellier, in the heart of a business hotel.
Created in 2014, it is equipped with state-of-the-art equipment to analyze metals in water, soil and plants. Plasma torches, atomic absorption apparatus, mass spectrometers or microwave reactors are activated to identify and dose them. By their side, the traditional balloons are boiling quietly.
The CNRS researcher supervises a team of a dozen people who are dedicated to depolluting plants. At the foot of the buildings, the invasive cane of Provence has already been sifted through their experiments. On her desk: cuttings that she “permanently redone”. All around, the plants compete with the documents and the prices carelessly interspersed on its shelves.
At 61, Claude Grison received, on June 21, that of the European inventor of the year in the research category, awarded by the European Patent Office. It is in addition to that of the Academy of Sciences or the prestigious CNRS innovation medal. The one who is at the origin of the filing of no less than thirty-six patents (in the name of the CNRS and the University of Montpellier) sees in it a support for her discipline, “scientific ecology”.
It is her work on terrestrial plants that absorb metals that she recycles in the form of ecocatalysts (a substance that increases the speed of a chemical reaction) that has won the award. We can’t help but see in it also a consecration of his tenacity. Like the plants she studies, Claude Grison has managed to deploy herself where she was not expected. Daughter of the Meuse and two employees of La Banque Postale, she sees her father write in parallel on his passion: the civilizations of the Far East.
Claude Grison is passionate about the blue stool (“Noccaea caerulescens”), present on the wastelands of Saint-Laurent-le-Minier (Gard), so polluted that almost nothing grows there
With her baccalaureate in hand, she left Verdun to study science in Nancy. Confused at first by an insatiable curiosity, she finally chose a transversal specialty that crosses chemistry and biology: the chemistry of life. Her post-doctoral contract led her into industry, with Elf Aquitaine, on the Lacq site (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), where she worked on catalysts of mining origin. Entering the university career, Claude Grison devoted himself to virulent bacteria. But the economic world is never far away: his laboratory continues to collaborate for years with Lacq.
You have 70.36% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.