Nathalie Picqué is Director at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy and Professor of Physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Previously, she was a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany, and, before that, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Orsay, France. She received her doctoral degree in physics from the University Paris-Saclay, France, in 1998.

Picqué is a pioneer in the development and application of techniques of spectroscopy over broad spectral bandwidths with optical frequency combs. These methods include dual-comb spectroscopy and Fourier-transform spectroscopy with a laser frequency comb. She showed how to interrogate and analyze broadband molecular spectra with thousands or millions of comb lines simultaneously. Dual-comb interferometers without moving parts perform direct frequency measurements over a wide span, with no geometric limitations to resolution. They have created new opportunities for precision spectroscopy and for miniaturized spectrometers on photonic chips. Dual-comb spectroscopy has now spread around the world.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 Coblentz Award, the 2021 Gentner-Kastler Prize, the 2022 Helmholtz Prize, and the 2022 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough in Physical Sciences. She is a Fellow of Optica and received the society’s 2024 William F. Meggers Award, “For pioneering broadband molecular spectroscopy with interfering frequency combs.”