Emmanuelle Lacaze completed her PHD in 1991 at University Denis Diderot - Paris. She obtained a position of researcher of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), also in 1991, to start her research at the Groupe de Physique des Solides which later became the Institute des Nano-Sciences de Paris. Her research focusses on organic materials, in particular liquid crystals and their topological defects, on nanoparticles for their optical properties and on composite materials. For the latter, she is trying to understand how the combination of organic materials and nanoparticles can not only combine the properties of both materials, but also bring out entirely new properties. She is an experimentalist and mainly uses optical microscopy and optical spectroscopies combined with measurements in synchrotron radiation facilities. She is now research director at CNRS. She has been in charge of the Very Large Infrastructures at the Physics Institute of CNRS between 2017 and 2020.