Lot-et-Garonne is in the spotlight this year, with the Nobel Prize in physics Alain Aspect, from Agen, and the chemist Jean-Marie Tarascon, from Marmandais, who will receive the CNRS gold medal on December 19. .
Without a mustache but with the same warmth in his voice, the latter could even have claimed the Nobel in his discipline for his major role in the development of lithium batteries, ubiquitous in our daily lives. But if his contributions to this technology are numerous, he arrived in history after the three pioneers awarded the Nobel in 2019, with whom he however shared the Balzan Prize in 2020.
The CV of this still very active 69-year-old researcher, professor at the Collège de France since 2014, impresses: more than 700 research articles, around a hundred patents and a driving role for solid-state chemistry in France. He has thus developed more efficient electrodes and electrolytes (the medium between two electrodes). He is the inventor of flexible plastic batteries. He is at the origin of sodium batteries, instead of lithium, adapted to high power needs and which the start-up Tiamat, which he co-founded, is preparing to market. He also brought to light several promising physico-chemical phenomena for even better exploitation of batteries. On November 7, he published in Nature Energy a new futuristic idea, allowing to know in real time the state of health of a battery thanks to optical fibers. “From the fundamental to the useful”he likes to sum up his achievements. “The estate owes him a lot”insists Mathieu Morcrette, his successor at the head of the Laboratory of Reactivity and Chemistry of Solids in Amiens.
“It’s not a full head that counts, but curiosity, excitement when faced with questions and the pleasure of experimenting” Jean-Marie Tarascon
Beyond such a CV, his career and his personality clash, far from the canons of the French elites. Son of farmers, he prefers his parents’ fields or the rugby pitches of Marmande and Grignols rather than school. He repeats his 4e, has her remedial baccalaureate and enrolls at the University of Bordeaux, where a click occurs after her 20th birthday. He realizes that the qualities he has developed with his feet in the ground, such as observation of nature, curiosity, or manual agility, are very useful in science. “This background defines my style of research. It’s not a full head that counts, but curiosity, excitement when faced with questions and the pleasure of experimenting.”he notes.
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