Professor Michel Meunier of Polytechnique's Department of Engineering Physics was invited in February to give a plenary presentation at the prestigious SPIE (International Society for Optics Engineering) Photonics West international conference in San Francisco.

Professor Meunier presented his unique laser multi-nanoscalpel technique, for which his group is the worldwide leader. The method developed by Professor Meunier and his team uses a laser with ultra-short pulses in concert with gold nanoparticles. Deposited on cells, the nanoparticles concentrate the laser's energy, making it possible to perform surgery on a nanometric scale in an extremely precise, non-invasive way. The technique, among other things, allows the expression of genes in cancerous cells to be modified, and could even be used to slow their migration, avoiding metastases. This is the only laser that can make incisions in the membranes of several cells simultaneously.

Professor Meunier's technique has been the subject of numerous interviews and reports. His team's research work ranked second in Québec Science magazine's top 10 discoveries of the year for 2012.

Professor Meunier earned his doctorate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984 and has been a professor at Polytechnique Montréal since 1986. Since 2011, he has held the Canada Research Chair in Micro- and Nano-Engineering of Materials Using Lasers. He is a member of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and the Optical Society of America (OSA). He leads a 20-person research group and has published more than 330 scientific articles.

See also:
Professor Meunier's presentation
Professor Meunier's expertise
Report published in the March 2014 issue of Electro Optics magazine
Article published in Québec Science magazine on Professor Meunier's team and its work
Laser Processing and Plasmonics Laboratory website