Role: Optical System Engineer

Martin Pertenais has obtained an optical engineer degree from the prestigious Engineer School Institut d’Optique Graduate School (IOGS) in Paris and a MSc in photonics from the University of Jena. He then undertook a PhD thesis in instrumentation for astrophysics at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse and at the Paris Observatory (LESIA) on “Stellar UV and Visible spectropolarimetry from space”. This allowed him in particular to innovate in new technologies for spectropolarimetry by building two prototypes of cutting-edge polychromatic polarimeters.

In this frame, he was also the Optical System Engineer for the mission proposal Arago (M4 and M5 ESA Cosmic Vision candidate) and Work Package leader for the polarimeter and the spectrograph of the Payload.
For his work, he received the Young Researcher Awardby CNES in 2015 and the MERAC Prize for New Technologiesfrom the European Astronomical Society in 2018.
He is currently co-supervising a PhD student continuing his work on UV spectropolarimeters, this time for the NASA flagship mission proposal LUVOIR.

After his PhD thesis, he moved on a position at DLR (Institute of Optical Sensor Systems, Berlin) as the Optical System Engineer for PLATO. He is part of the System Team supporting the Principal Investigator for all technical and engineering aspects, as well as for requirement engineering purposes.