’My job as a professor keeps me forever a student’

Jean-Philippe Brantut, winner of the 2023 best teacher award for the physics section - 2023 EPFL/Alain Herzog - CC-BY-SA 4. Jean-Philippe Brantut comes to his lab with a new idea just about every week. But what he encourages his students to do is just the opposite - rather than bounce around, he wants them to dig deep into a single topic. "EPFL students like a challenge and they like learning hard things," says Brantut, winner of the 2023 best teacher award for the physics section . "If a class gives them a headache, it's a good sign! For me that's perfect, since I teach a particularly headache-inducing subject." It would seem that Brantut, an associate professor and the head of the Laboratory for Quantum Gases (LQG), is adept at making hard things seem simple: "The classes I get the best evaluations for are usually those in which I attempt to explain complicated material," he says. Given all that, you would think that Brantut was born with a physics textbook tucked under his arm. Not quite.