Claudine Hermann

Biography

Early life and education

Claudine Rodrigues was the daughter of a pharmacist. She studied at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles and graduated in 1965. In 1969, she passed the competitive agrégation examination in physics. The same year she married Jean-Paul Hermann whose career was similar to her own. By 1980, they had three children together.

She completed her doctoral studies at Paris Diderot University in 1976, with a thesis titled "Pompage optique dans l'antimoniure de gallium : détection optique de la résonance électronique" (Optical pumping in gallium antimonide: optical detection of electron resonance). In 1977 she published the obtained value of the Landé g-factor g=-0.44 for electrons in gallium arsenide, which is important for spin physics in the quantum Hall regime.

Research and career

Hermann was appointed a lecturer at École Polytechnique in 1980. She taught classes in semiconductor physics. She worked on the optical properties of solids, in particular the photo-emission of polarised electrons. She developed techniques to optically measure the spin resonance in semiconductors. She demonstrated the hole effective mass (0.051) of indium gallium arsenide in 1981.

Hermann was the first woman to be appointed Professor at the École Polytechnique in 1992. She spent a year as a visiting researcher at Nagoya University in Japan in 1998.

Activism

Thanks to her connection with Huguette Delavault, she developed a strong interest in women scientists in France. She was startled to find that at the École Polytechnique, only 15% of the students were women. This observation led her to attend conferences and write papers on promoting the role of women in the area of science.

In the year 2000, together with Françoise Cyrot-Lackmann, Huguette Delavault, Françoise Gaspard, Colette Kreder and the Femmes et Mathématiques association, Hermann was behind the creation of Femmes et Sciences, an organization designed to encourage girls and women to participate in science. In early 2025, it proposed that the names of 72 women in science should be added to the Eiffel Tower.

Alongside her research into condensed matter, Hermann worked to make the environment better for women physicists. In 1999 she was appointed to the European Union Helsinki Group on women and science, and remained a member until 2006. She co-founded the platform Femmes et Sciences with Huguette Delavault in 2000. She was a member of the expert group who produced the European Technology Assessment Network (ETAN) report on women in academia - Science Policies in the European Union: promoting excellence through mainstreaming gender equality - for the European Union in 2000.

Hermann was President of the European Platform of Women Scientists from 2017-2021, and was elected also the President of Honour of the EPWS in 2021, shortly before her death.

Death

Claudine Hermann, aged 76, passed away on 17 July 2021, in a struggle against cancer.