Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is France's principal public research organization, headquartered in Paris. Established in 1939 to organize state-funded science, it expanded after World War II into a national network of laboratories, most of them mixed units with universities and grandes écoles. It is a research agency rather than a collegiate university, structured by scientific institutes that span the natural sciences, engineering, the humanities and the social sciences.

CNRS work is grouped in national institutes covering physics, mathematics, chemistry, biological sciences, ecology and the environment, humanities and social sciences, and engineering and systems sciences. Graduate researchers sit in joint laboratories on university campuses and at large instruments, observatories and field stations. Doctoral enrollment is through French doctoral schools at partner universities, with CNRS scientists as thesis supervisors.

The organization employs about 32,000 people, including more than 11,000 researchers and a large corps of engineers and technicians, together with several thousand doctoral candidates and postdoctoral fellows. Staff and students come from France and many other countries. Nobel laureates who worked in CNRS laboratories include Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Jean-Marie Lehn.

Graduate study associated with CNRS is the French doctorate, prepared in a laboratory while the student is registered at a university. Supervision is lab-based and full-time research. Funding typically takes the form of doctoral contracts. Daily life is that of a research campus in Paris or the regions, not of a single undergraduate college.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique lists 1 doctoral program, in physics.