Joseph Zyss is an emeritus Professor in Physics at Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay since 2015. He has been living since then with his wife Sara-Hélène in Tel Aviv. A graduate from Ecole Polytechnique (1969-72), he earned a PhD in physics at Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris (1982). He is the founder of the multidisciplinary D'Alembert Institute and of a joint laboratory between CNRS and the Weizmann Institute in Israel as well as the initiator of the French-Israel International Conference on Quantum and Nonlinear Optics which he started and directed with Garry Berkovic now at Beer Sheva University in 1987 and in following years with Professor Yehiam Prior from the Weizmann Institute and has become a major event on the French and Israeli Physics seen and beyond, running every two years to this day alternatively in Israel and France. Joseph has played a pioneering role in molecular nonlinear and laser optics with related photonics applications, from bulk crystals down to micro- and nano-scales, based on an original combination of algebraic, chemical and physical concepts as well as fabrication technologies. Among other tributes, he has been a recipient of the Meyerhoff fellowship from the Weizmann Institute, the IBM and Yves Rocard awards from the French Physical Society, the French German Humboldt-Gay-Lussac award and is a fellow of the Optical Society of America. He has authored or co-authored more than 600 research papers in peer reviewed international journals, some of which having been cited more than a thousand times. Throughout his career, he has actively promoted and exemplified a multidisciplinary approach that disregards artificial barriers between disciplines, in particular physics and chemistry, as well as between fundamentals and applications in that probably faithful to the vocation of passage of an "Ivri". As time goes by, my personal interests and views, including lecturing, have been extending to connections between Judaïsm, Science, Politics and Culture as well as a more recent focus in the emergence of AI in these domains, also hands-on as a scientific enduser, with all its plus and minuses but nevertheless an irreversible one that is already reshaping our society in a disruptive way.
