Institutes & Facilities

In a nutshell

The international machines are the reason many scientists come to Grenoble, but they sit among national laboratories, a large university and a technology research centre. This page lists the main ones, grouped by what they do.

A useful distinction: the ESRF and the ILL are built to serve visiting scientists, who apply for time on their instruments, while most of the others are research institutes with their own staff and projects.

Big machines

ESRF, the European Synchrotron: an 844-metre X-ray source run by 19 partner countries, with more than 9,000 visiting scientists a year. Its 44 beamlines are open to academic researchers through peer review and to companies on a confidential, paid basis. See The European Synchrotron.

ILL, the Institut Laue-Langevin: a research reactor producing neutrons for around forty instruments, with an annual budget of about 100 million euros; in 2023 more than 1,600 researchers from 40 countries carried out experiments there. See Europe’s neutron source.

LNCMI, the CNRS national high magnetic field laboratory, has its steady-field site in Grenoble and its pulsed-field site in Toulouse. Its Grenoble history includes the 1980 discovery of the quantum Hall effect, and between 2011 and 2024 a new 43-tesla hybrid magnet was built there. See City & Region.

Structural biology

EMBL Grenoble, a site of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory since 1975, and the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS), a joint unit of the CEA, the CNRS and Université Grenoble Alpes, work beside the two machines on the shapes and workings of biological molecules. With the ESRF and the ILL they form the Partnership for Structural Biology. See One campus, four institutes.

Technology and innovation

CEA-Leti, founded in 1967, is a research centre for micro- and nanotechnologies with more than 2,000 experts; transferring its technologies to companies is part of its mission.

GIANT (Grenoble Innovation for Advanced New Technologies) is an alliance of eight partners on the Presqu’île that links higher education, research and industry around health, information, energy and the environment.

Grenoble INP, the engineering institute that grew from the city’s Institute of Electrotechnics, opened in 1900, is part of Université Grenoble Alpes. In 2002 it was a founding member of MINATEC, the micro- and nanotechnology innovation hub inaugurated in 2006.

Earth and environment

The Institute of Environmental Geosciences (IGE) has more than 300 staff working on climate, glaciers, ice cores, water and the atmosphere.

The Lautaret Garden, at about 2,100 metres, is both a botanical garden and a research support unit of Université Grenoble Alpes and the CNRS, with a laboratory chalet for research on alpine plants and ecosystems. More on Grenoble’s mountain science is on City & Region.

The university

Université Grenoble Alpes brings together the university, engineering schools and research bodies in one institution, in its present form since 2020. Many of the laboratories on this page are run jointly with it. Its long history is told on City & Region.