Fadi Baida

Fadi I. Baida was born in Kalamoun, Lebanon in February 1965. After graduating from high school, he fled the Lebanese civil war to complete his university studies in Besançon, France where he obtained a B.Sc. in Physics in 1991. He later completed his master's degree at the University of Franche-Comté (UFC) in Besançon with a master’s internship on “Atomic force Microscopy” (AFM). His PhD thesis, supervised by Mr. Daniel Courjon, focused on the design, fabrication and characterization of a local microscope probe combining atomic force detection with near-field optical detection. He defended his thesis in February 1995 and received the congratulations of the jury chaired by Professor Daniel Robert.

Between 1995 and 1996, he held a postdoctoral position at the P.M. Duffieux Optics Laboratory in Besançon, funded by the CNRS, focused on the implementation of a standalone version of the compound microscope developed during his PhD. F. Baida was subsequently appointed as an Assistant Professor at UFC in September 1996.

In December 2003, he completed his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) titled "Modeling in Nano-Optics” and defended it in presence of a jury of specialists (D. Maystre, C. Boccara, D. Courjon, D. Van Labeke, J.-M. Vigoureux and D. Barchiesi).

In September 2006, F.I. Baida was promoted to the rank of University Professor at UFC and is currently conducting his scientific research at FEMTO-ST Institute in the Department of Optics P.M. Duffieux as part of the Nano-Optics team. His research is focused on the modeling of the matter-light interaction at the nanometric scale including Near-field imaging, Metamaterials, Nano-Antennas and Photonic Crystals. His theoretical work is carried out in close collaboration with scientists of his team and various national and international teams working in the field of Nano-Optics. He has acquired a profound expertise in the implementation and adaptation of the finite difference time domain method (FDTD) to the field of Nano-Optics. He has been a pioneer in the field of Enhanced Transmission Metallic Metamaterials (ETMM) in the visible spectral range by proposing, together with D. Van Labeke, the AAA (Annular Aperture Arrays) structure in 2002, which has experimentally demonstrated a transmission up to 92% at 700nm wavelength (world record at present). 

F. I. Baida has always maintained a full-time teaching position (192h/year) by undertaking the teaching responsibility of 3 courses (electromagnetism and optical waves in L3, Advanced Numerical Methods in M1 and Nano-Optics in M2). Since December 2016, he is the advisor of a professional University degree (Bachelor level) named OIP (Optical Instrumentation and nano-Photonics) at the UFC.

F. I. Baida has supervised and co-supervised more than 25 theses, a dozen of master traineeships and published about 150 articles in international scientific journals in addition to 6 book chapters.