Platforms and major facilities

Research

The University of Lille and its partners have pooled their major scientific facilities and infrastructures to make them more accessible to the academic and private sectors.

Platforms

The University of Lille has accredited 50 platforms, which are organised around 10 themes and made accessible to the academic and private sectors to accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries.

National and international platforms

The platforms are key to positioning the Lille site at the highest international level and strengthening research partnerships with the socio-economic and cultural sectors. They cover all research topic areas in Lille. Many are recognised as facilities of excellence and are involved in national and international networks.

Expertise for the public and private sectors

The platforms provide the expertise of researchers, engineers and technicians in the use of cutting-edge equipment and the provision of services. They also provide access to databases and the computing resources needed to process them.

The topic areas

Mechanical and civil engineering

Unique testing facilities for studying wall turbulence at high Reynolds numbers and flow control
Expertise in optical metrology (PIV) and hot-wire anemometry

For further details, please consult the detailed information sheet.

Scientific director: Jean-Marc Foucaut

Technical director: Christophe Cuvier

Contact: jean-marc.foucaut@centralelille.fr

Under the administrative supervision of: University of Lille, CNRS, Centrale de Lille

Major facilities

The University of Lille leads or participates in major national and international research infrastructures, as well as facilities of excellence (Équipex+).

Research infrastructure

Research infrastructures are facilities, resources or services that are used by researchers to carry out their work and promote innovation in their own scientific fields. Most are organised and run on a national or even international scale. University of Lille takes part in 11 research infrastructures.

ACTRIS-FR is the French component of ACTRIS, the European initiative for the observation and exploration of aerosols, clouds and reactive gases and their interactions. ACTRIS is a distributed research infrastructure supporting research into the climate and air quality. It improves our understanding of the past, present and future evolution of atmospheric composition.

Infrastructure manager: Paolo Laj

Lille platform involved: CARS-ACTRIS

ChemBioFrance is designed to promote and energise exchanges at the interfaces of chemistry, biology and cheminformatics in order to develop new strategies for the discovery and development of bioactive molecules for the benefit of researchers in both the public and private sectors.

ChemBioFrance is also creating a collection of standardised (quality control and use protocols) and validated (accepted model for a given human pathology, infection, parasite, etc.) targets, distributed based on the national chemical library model. ChemBioFrance offers scientific and technical solutions to optimise development (TRL 2-6) and increase the success rate in the pre-commercial and commercial phases (TRL 7-9) of new molecules.

Infrastructure manager in France: Jean-Luc Galzi

Lille platform involved: ARIADNE – Criblage UMS 2014 PLBS

The main mission of Data Terra ‘data and service clusters for the Earth system’ is to develop a global system for accessing and processing data, products and services enabling integrated observation, understanding and forecasting of the history, functioning and evolution of the Earth system in the face of global change. Aimed at the scientific community as well as public and socio-economic actors, these multi-source data, products and services can be accessed via a unified, coherent portal.

It is based on four data clusters corresponding to each of the major compartments of the Earth System:

THEIA for continental surface data (agriculture, forests, biodiversity, etc.)
AERIS for atmospheric data (gases, aerosols, clouds, etc.)
ODATIS for ocean data (marine altimetry, phytoplankton, pigmentation, etc.)
ForM@Ter for solid earth data (volcanoes, erosion, tectonics, etc.)

Infrastructure managers: Frédéric Huynh

Lille platform involved: UMS ICARE

France Génomique offers the public and private scientific community access to the best French platforms, project support and the opportunity to participate in international projects.

The infrastructure provides cutting-edge expertise in genomics and related bioinformatics, and competitive genomics and bioinformatics services in coordination with the IFB. The aim is to guarantee France’s independence in areas that are more strategic than ever for life sciences research.

Infrastructure manager: Patrick Wincker

Lille platforms involved: LIGANPM, GO@L and Bilille de l’UAR 2014 - US 41 PLBS

The France Grilles national distributed computing infrastructure is multi-disciplinary, open to all disciplines and to developing countries. Its main missions are:

Establishing and operating national cloud and production grid infrastructures for processing and storing large amounts of scientific data;
Contributing, together with the other member states involved, to the operation of the European EGI infrastructure (www.egi.eu) and defining the terms of French participation in the EGI.eu association, which coordinates the EGI federation;
Promoting closer ties and exchanges between teams working on production and research grids.

Infrastructure manager: Vincent Breton

Lille platform involved: Lille Mesocentre

The TGIR’s main mission is to build, together with the communities involved and based on scientific guidance, a world-class digital infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities.

Through consortia that bring together parties from the scientific communities and a network of points of presence in the human sciences centres (maisons des sciences de l’Homme; MSH), it structures support for HSS scientific communities with respect to digital infrastructure for research data.

Infrastructure manager in France: Olivier Baude

Lille research unit involved: MESHS

At the beginning of 2022, Infranalytics will be a multi-technique, multi-site national research infrastructure (RI) resulting from the merger of three French RIs dedicated to chemical characterisation and analysis:

Ultra-high field nuclear magnetic resonance(UHF – NMR)research infrastructure
National interdisciplinary electron paramagnetic resonance network(RENARD)
National ultra-high field FT-ICR mass spectrometry network(FT-ICR)

Infranalytics will offer academic and industrial actors access to state-of-the-art spectrometers, as well as scientific expertise and technical support for a wide range of experiments in the fields of health, the environment, energy, materials and the food industry.

Lille platforms involved: The institut Chevreul’s Advanced Characterisation Platform for Chemistry’sNMR, MEMR and mass spectrometry clusters.

The Institut Français de Bioinformatique is a national bioinformatics service infrastructure. Its main mission is to provide basic resources in this field to the life sciences community. The various services offered by IFB platforms can be grouped into 5 main categories:

Data: providing high added-value data collections based on laboratory expertise
Tools: disseminating innovative tools for analysing laboratory-generated biological data
Training users in bioinformatics techniques and concepts
Supporting biologists’ research projects in bioinformatics analysis
Infrastructure: providing an IT infrastructure dedicated to the management and analysis of data produced by the life sciences.

Infrastructure manager: Claudine Médigue and Jacques van Helden

Lille platforms involved: Bilille de l’UAR 2014 - US 41PLBS, Lille Mesocentre

PROGEDO is the central player in ministerial policies concerning the production and management of data in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). The infrastructure’s mission is to develop a data culture and raise the level of national structuring of research communities by rolling out a development strategy shared by research organisations, major institutions and universities, and to strengthen France’s position in the European research area.

To this end, PROGEDO organises support for the collection, documentation, preservation and dissemination of a vast array of data required for research in the social sciences and humanities, and helps set up secure micro-data access systems. PROGEDO also supports major international surveys and provides access to a number of foreign HSS databases.

Infrastructure manager: Pascal Buleon

Lille platform involved: PUDL

Renatech is the French academic network for cutting-edge equipment in the field of micro- and nanotechnologies. Its aim is to develop, maintain and provide a competitive infrastructure for research and R&D in micro- and nanofabrication in France, working with both academic and industrial customers.

Our manufacturing plants are located all over France to guarantee the proximity you need to carry out your projects.

Infrastructure manager: Michel de Labachelerie

Lille platforms involved: Micro/nanofabrication plant and the IEMN’s Multi-Physics Characterisation Platform’s near-field microscopy cluster

SILECS is a large-scale scientific tool for extrapolating, observing and validating models, algorithms and technologies for these large-scale systems. It focuses on four aspects: the Internet of Servers, the Internet of Things, wireless networks and interconnected networks. It consists of an instrument and software tools that provide access to a wide variety of advanced computing resources of varying sizes. Researchers and industrialists will be able to test, observe and analyse models, algorithms and solutions.

Infrastructure manager in France: Frédéric Desprez, Serge Fdida

Lille platform involved: Lille Mesocentre

Équipex+

Équipex+ are nationwide facilities whose main vocation is scientific research, and which represent French scientific leadership. The University of Lille is involved in 9 Equipex+ projects which have been awarded funding under the Programme d'investissements d'avenir (PIA 3).

The Add4P EquipEx+ focuses on the additive manufacturing of glasses and photonics components, with objectives including performance gains, weight reduction, increased mechanical and thermal resistance of parts, original design of new functions and more.

Local contact: Marc Douay

Participating platform in Lille: Fibertech Lille

Continuum aims to create a ‘collaborative continuity from digital to human’ by developing interdisciplinary research between computer science and the humanities and social sciences. The project brings together equipment such as huge screen walls, immersive rooms and virtual or augmented reality headsets, spread across 30 platforms. This equipment is used in particular to visualise complex scientific data and to create virtual environments, for example to study and cure phobias, or to design historical reconstructions.

Local contact: Yann Coello

Participating platform in Lille: Irdive

The GAIA Data project aims to develop a data and services infrastructure for observing and understanding the Earth system, biodiversity and the environment.

The GAIA Data project brings together three digital research infrastructures in the field of Earth and Environment systems: Data Terra organises integrated access to observation data covering the different compartments of the earth system and their interactions, CLIMERI-France produces international numerical simulations for the WCRP (to be specified) and makes their results available to various users in France and abroad, and PNDB,the national biodiversity data centre, brings together existing data approaches within the living earth researchinfrastructures.

Local contact: Jérôme Riedi

Participating platform in Lille: ICARE

The MesoNET EquipEx+ will meet the needs of academic and industrial researchers through the development of structuring digital equipment, with the long-term objective of setting up a distributed infrastructure dedicated to the coordination of HPC-AI(High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence) in France via a network of mesocentres.

Local contact: Matthieu Marquillie

Participating platform in Lille: Lille Mesocentre

The EquipEx+ MuDiS4LS (Mutualised Digital Spaces for FAIR data in Life and Health Science) project is supported by the Institut Français deBioinformatique.

The overall project is structured around 4 work packages:

Orchestrating data flows for life sciences.
Distributed data infrastructure for project-life-long secured storage and backup.
Data access and outreach.
Intensive Computational Biology (Access to national HPC/AI resources).

which are complemented by 5 implementation studies:

Imaging data integration and FAIR sharing.
Marine biology data integration and dissemination.
Bioinformatics solutions to handle health data.
FAIR Integration and sharing of new data deluge in microbiome research.
Integration and FAIR sharing of genetic and multi-omics data for agriculture.

Local contact: Guillemette Marot

Participating platform in Lille: Bilille

The NANOFUTUR Equipex+ has identified the facilities needed to remain competitive and meet the nanomanufacturing and nanotechnology challenges of the coming decade. The themes of the future in which French expertise is highly competitive are:

photonics, evolving towards on-chip integration of more varied functions for information processing – including quantum information and artificial intelligence
spintronics, which promises a major reduction in power consumption in the digital world
teraHertz technologies, which will be rapidly deployed after 6G or 7G for ultra-high-speed wireless communications
nanobiotechnologies, which will provide a better understanding of how living organisms function and enable ultra-miniature medical devices to be implanted in human beings, (5) sensors, which will be increasingly ubiquitous in the future in the Internet of Things. Finally, a fundamental underlying challenge common to all of the above
‘Nano-manipulation and nano-assembly’ will enable the assembly of ultra-pure nanometric layers for performing new, hitherto inaccessible functions. The chosen equipment is often unique in Europe, and will be the only equipment of its kind in France that is accessible to all.

Local contact: Christophe Lethien

Participating platform in Lille: Centrale de Nano-Micro Fabrication de l’IEMN

EquipEx+ OBS4CLIM is the result of a concerted innovative effort by the three French components of the national nodes of the European Research Infrastructures (RI) in the atmospheric field: the ESFRI ACTRIS project, the ESFRI IAGOS Landmark and the atmospheric component of the ESFRI ICOS Landmark.

OBS4CLIM is developing a common strategy for the implementation of services aimed at strengthening the integration of ‘atmospheric RIs’ and their synergies through, for example, innovation, shared use of equipment and harmonisation of access conditions.

The aim of OBS4CLIM is to provide atmospheric RIs with adequate investment to continue serving users whilst providing the highest level of quality for the next 15 years. Furthermore, OBS4CLIM will enable us to respond to new needs, such as making the most of networks’ four dimensions (longer, uninterrupted time series, synergies with observations from space, a more global and denser network in specific regions, intelligent specialisations, etc.).

Participating platform in Lille: CARS-ACTRIS

Local contact: Phillipe Gouloub

The TIRREX (Technological Infrastructure for Excellence in Robotics Research) EquipEx+ coordinates the development of and access to key new robotics platforms at national level. Parties involved in robotics research are brought together in this project, which is structured around six focus areas and three transdisciplinary focus areas. Alongside prototyping and design, and manipulation, the third transdisciplinary focus area will be open infrastructures, in order to guarantee and standardise access to free data, software and publications (digital twins, FAIR data and open source software). The TIRREX infrastructure, which is supported by more than 50 companies or networks of companies, will give the academic community, including members of the Groupement de Recherche (GDR) Robotique (Robotics Research Group), access to top-level, world-class equipment.

Local contact: Maan El Badaoui

Participating platform in Lille: PRETIL

The aim of the T-REFIMEVE Equipex+ is to make available to the scientific community and industry a complete set of time and frequency signals at the best international standard that metrology research units can provide, taking advantage of the exceptional precision of atomic clocks and the guided propagation of optical fibres. More than 30 research units and institutes throughout France will be connected. Other research units in the region will be able to connect easily in the future. This set-up is unmatched anywhere in the world.

Local contact: Arnaud Mussot

Contact:

Service platforms: dar-plateformes[at]univ-lille[point]fr