Luc Paquet and Oussama Moutanabbir will serve as executive director and scientific director, respectively, of the future Lassonde Deeptech Institute. (photo: Alex Tran and Caroline Perron)

 

Montreal, Tuesday, November 18, 2025 – The Polytechnique Montréal community is proud to welcome Luc Paquet to its team as executive director of the future Lassonde Deeptech Institute, a deeptech initiative dedicated to accelerating technologies with a strong societal impact. At the same time, Polytechnique has appointed Professor Oussama Moutanabbir as the Institute’s scientific director. 

With a background combining private enterprise and academic leadership, Luc Paquet brings to Polytechnique a wealth of experience that is ideally suited to propel the Lassonde Institute forward with its transformative mission, making it one of the flagship initiatives of Quebec’s premiere engineering university. 

A biochemist by training, Dr. Paquet has pursued a career since 1996 that has taken him from the world of biotechnology to that of research advancement and commercialization. From 2007 to 2013, he headed the Institute of Pharmacology at the Université de Sherbrooke. From 2013 to 2018, he worked as head of TransfertTech Sherbrooke, the university’s technology transfer and commercialization company, before performing similar duties at Univalor from 2019 to 2021. He then became Chief Executive Officer at the Sherbrooke-based biotechnology company Immune Biosolutions. 

Dr. Paquet’s varied career path has taught him how to manage multidisciplinary teams and develop transformative partnerships, both nationally and internationally, supported by a network of influential contacts in the institutional, public and industrial sectors. 

His extensive experience in strategic management, business development and multidisciplinary teams will enable him to support the launch of this major institute and to ensure its structured development and growth within the Quebec and Canadian high-tech ecosystem.  

“Throughout my career, I have had to convert ambitious projects into concrete results,” Dr. Paquet said. “I am confident that I will be able to carry out my mission by drawing on the incredible pool of talented people already working at Polytechnique and the significant resources available to the Institute.” 

Oussama Moutanabbir appointed scientific director 

Polytechnique Montréal has also appointed Oussama Moutanabbir as scientific director of the future Lassonde Deeptech Institute. 

A full professor of engineering physics at Polytechnique Montréal, Oussama Moutanabbir has been leading a research program in quantum engineering of semiconductors based on silicon, germanium and tin (Group IV) alloys since 2012.  

Professor Moutanabbir holds a PhD in energy and materials science from the Institut national de recherche scientifique (INRS). He worked at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, before moving to Japan as a visiting researcher at the RIKEN Institute of Advanced Science. 

At Polytechnique Montréal, he led the work of the Canada Research Chair in Nanoscale and Quantum Semiconductors from 2012 to 2022. He also led a Canada-wide research network on compact photonics in the mid-infrared and terahertz ranges from 2018 to 2023 as part of a project funded by the Canadian Department of National Defence’s Innovation for Defence, Excellence, and Security (IDEaS) program. In 2024, he launched the PolyAPT platform, a unique atomic probe tomography infrastructure in Canada focused on materials science, microelectronics and photonics research. 

Professor Moutanabbir’s work has earned him a number of distinctions and awards, including the ADRIQ Innovation Award, the ADRI University-Industry Partnership Award, the NSERC Synergy Award (2019), and the Leibniz IKZ International Award (2022). 

As scientific director of the Lassonde Institute, Professor Moutanabbir hopes to train and mobilize interdisciplinary teams through large-scale projects with a strong potential impact on Canadian society. He also plans to offer students and postdoctoral fellows a world-class working environment in which to carry out their projects successfully as well as all the tools required for business development. 

“The Institute’s promise is to enable its students to fulfill their dreams,” he explained. “Thanks to their energy and imagination, coupled with our facilities and expertise, we will have a tremendous foundation here not only to enable them to acquire skills and knowledge that go beyond research but also to propel Polytechnique’s innovations into Canadian society.” 

An institute to explore the unknown and accelerate innovation 

When the Lassonde family foundation made a historic $50 million donation to Polytechnique Montréal to create an institute specializing in disruptive innovations, he expressed his desire for the initiative to fulfill a two-fold mission: to train talent in the high-tech sector and to build a transformative initiative for the Canadian economy with the capacity to accelerate the development of technologies meeting the needs of Canadian society. 

The Lassonde Institute will oversee a wide array of projects, ranging from quantum engineering to artificial intelligence, photonics and nanotechnology. “All future technologies will be explored without disciplinary blinders, even those that do not yet have a name,” says Professor Moutanabbir.

Learn more about the Lassonde Deeptech Institute: https://www.polymtl.ca/institut-lassonde/en/

 

ABOUT POLYTECHNIQUE MONTRÉAL  

Founded in 1873, Polytechnique Montréal is one of Canada’s largest engineering education and research institutions. It is located on the Université de Montréal campus, the largest French-language university campus in the Americas. Polytechnique offers about 120 programs taught by over 300 professors, and welcomes in excess of 10,000 students yearly. It has produced than 64,000 graduates.  

 

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Martin Primeau
Media Relations Officer - Science Outreach
Polytechnique Montréal
514 805-0797
martin.primeau@polymtl.ca