After Decades of E-Textiles Work, a Rising Star Award

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I am currently a distinguished professor at ENSAIT, the textile engineering institute at the University of Lille, in Northern France. My scientific background is related to electronics and microelectronics and my PhD thesis was focused on the decentralized control of complex systems. I started my academic career as a young assistant professor at ENSAIT in 1991, in Roubaix, France. As the main application field of ENSAIT is associated with textiles, I had to adapt my courses and my research activities.

For the first time, I focused on the modeling and control of complex textile processes, and in the late ‘90s, I started to develop my scientific activities in the area of communicated textiles, even though at that time, it was pretty unclear to me how to connect the electronics—as well as the control and communication theories—to the textile structures. In the beginning, we developed flexible textile displays based on the weaving of optical fibers for France Telecom, and their research department. In April 2005, an article describing these first displays, “Optical fiber fabric display—OFFD,” was published in the journal Optics & Photonics News.

Currently, almost all the research activities of my group are focused on e-textiles. Many collaborative and B-to-B projects with French and EU companies are ongoing, and this activity has a steady growth rate.

To read this entire article, which appeared in the 2021 edition of Show & Tell Magazine, click here.