Jean-Philip Piquemal Receives the 2025 Honorary Award
 Presented at the France Quantum Conference in Paris

Jean-Philip Piquemal (center), recipient of the France Quantum Honorary Award on June 10 at Station F

A tribute to a pioneering scientist and entrepreneur

An internationally renowned researcher and member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Jean-Philip Piquemal specializes in the modeling of biological systems applied to pharmacy and medicine. With the co-founding of Qubit Pharmaceuticals, he has pursued a dual goal: to accelerate the discovery of new drugs and to break down silos in scientific research.

His career, like the story of Qubit Pharmaceuticals, is distinctly Franco-American. In 2000, Jean-Philip Piquemal studied theoretical chemistry at Sorbonne University (then Paris 6 University), later earning his PhD. In 2004, he moved to the United States to work at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a branch of the NIH and the American counterpart of Inserm. Upon returning to France two years later, he became an associate professor while continuing his work in theoretical chemistry.

His research ultimately led to the founding of Qubit Pharmaceuticals in 2020 alongside Louis Lagardère (Sorbonne University and CNRS), Matthieu Montes (CNAM), Jay Ponder (Washington University in St. Louis), and Pengyu Ren (University of Texas at Austin).

As Qubit Pharmaceuticals’ Chief Scientific Officer, he played a key role in building a unique simulation platform capable of leveraging quantum computing advances to speed up drug development. He has contributed to Qubit Pharmaceuticals’ successive scientific breakthroughs—often in collaboration with Sorbonne University—such as the development of the Hyperion-1 emulator, capable of running accelerated and accurate quantum algorithms of over 40 qubits on classical computers (see press release dated December 6, 2023), or more recently the launch of FeNNix-Bio1, the world’s most advanced foundation model (a large AI model trained on massive datasets) for molecular simulation in pharmaceutical chemistry. This model can simulate molecular behavior with unprecedented speed and precision (see press release dated May 20, 2025).University of Texas at Austin).

The France Quantum Award has previously been given to other prominent figures in the quantum community, including Pascale Senellart, professor of quantum mechanics at École Polytechnique, member of the French Academy of Technologies and co-founder of Quandela, and Alain Aspect, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics (2022) and co-founder of Pasqal.