European Researcher's Night in France

2026-07-22

We are proposing ERNs for 2016 and 2017 in 12 French cities. Our consortium of 11 partners will organise afternoons for schoolchildren, events in the cities and, above all, evenings where 1000 researchers will meet up to 30,000 people a year. The general public will be able to meet a number of researchers directly and experience something memorable with them. Since 2006, we have acquired a solid knowhow in the “art of interaction”. In 2014-2015, we went one step further by including the public in the actual research experiments, thereby creating scientist-citizen cooperation. We will renew these experiences and go even further: we are encouraging the public and researchers to experience creative moments together! Several creative interactions will be set up, around the “Ideas” theme in 2016 and the “Impossible?” theme in 2017, to allow researchers and the public to interact. The evenings will be full of ideas, challenges, and encounters with diverse individuals. In this way, we will rally European researchers to get involved in each city. Specific strategies will be used (such as public radio recordings) to allow them to share their European experience. These moments of cooperation will without a doubt reinforce the mutual appreciation between researchers and citizens. Our communication strategy (attracting specific audiences through networking, web, partnerships with youth-oriented press, etc.) will be based on the slogan: “General Creativity”. This slogan denotes the interactive nature of the evening and gives us a chance to talk about the richness of European research. To this effect, and for the first time, Cédric Villani, an inspiring and renowned researcher, has accepted to be the ERN’s patron. Lastly, we plan to renew the “Great Participatory Experiment” in 2017. In each city (and perhaps even Italy), the public will contribute to the same playful scientific experiment chosen in 2016 after a challenge involving all our research institutions.

France

2026-01-15