Alexey Kavokin
Alexey Kavokin is a Russian (also holding French citizenship) theoretical physicist, with a sui generis approach and understanding of the field. He is a major expert in the physics of polaritons where he has pioneered concepts such as the optical spin Hall effect, bosonic cascades or polariton-mediated superconductivity. He played a key role in the development of polariton condensation and in the theory of polariton spin. He is also a highly skill diplomat, great leader of teams of arbitrary sizes, scientific events organizer, book-writer, amateur of French gastronomy and wine, erudite in several branches of the humanities, free-thinking intellectual with far-reaching views and you might get lucky to hear him sing original guitar songs where you can even pop up as a character. The list does not end there.
Alexey 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 Elena & I's life-changing characters, for both the amount but also magnitudes of changes he brought to our 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.