Alexey Kavokin
Alexey Kavokin was my Ph. D director. He is the most remarkable person that I have ever met. I have always tried to keep a link to some of his countless activities, since this is the closest one can get to trade one's life with that of a character from a novel. He is one of our life-changing characters, for both the amount but also magnitudes of changes he brought to my destiny. I regard one of my major insights in life as having turned to him when seeking a Ph. D director, although trained as a corpuscular physics and with little a priori interest for Alexey's condensed matter topic. There was something obvious to me, however, that he was a glowing gem cast in a basically inert rock (that was the Université Blaise Pascal). He is infinitely surprising by the definition that, however high you set the expectation, he'll eventually come to surprise you.