Orphée Cugat, lauréat de la Médaille de l'innovation 2019

On the occasion of the 2019 CNRS Innovation Medal award, we look back at the career of Orphée Cugat, a researcher in electrical engineering. A CNRS researcher at the Grenoble Electrical Engineering Laboratory, he explores magnetism in milli and microsystems. A born inventor, Orphée Cugat was initially trained as a general engineer at the Arts et Métiers engineering institute, but finally decided to complete a thesis and then a post-doctorate in Ireland. In Grenoble, his group began developing sub-miniature motors and generators, then developed original levitation devices and now applications for medical technologies. Among other developments, this work led to the start-up Enerbee, where a connected, contact-less air vent harvests enough energy from the rotation of a rotor to power integrated air quality sensors. Even more ambitious, the start-up MagIA provides diagnostics in fifteen minutes. The instrument requires only a drop of blood to simultaneously detect and analyse hepatitis B and C or HIV.