With the advent of ultrashort light pulses of picosecond/femtosecond durations, numerous novel applications and potential capabilities have emerged. However, ultrashort fiber laser must operate in a nonlinear propagation regime with a complex balance among gain, spectral filtering, dispersion and nonlinear broadening. Furthermore, all current families of ultrafast lasers are based on single mode fibers (SMFs) and these have now reached limits in their application domains because of their inherent limited peak power handling capability. In order to overcome the aforementioned barrier for ultrafast fiber lasers, and enhance their operational range, I suggest to replace single mode fibers by multimode fibers. The main goal of this proposed MSCA Individual Fellowship is therefore to develop new ideas for the mode locking of lasers based on multimode gain fiber by controlling their spatio-temporal complex dynamics, and then to demonstrate generation of ultrashort light pulses with high average power and high peak power. The nonlinear coupling among the fiber modes can self-maintain a high degree of spatial coherence while permitting a high degree of temporal coherence with the locking of the modes on a common group delay. I propose to explore multimode space-time soliton propagation and beam nonlinear “self-cleaning” in amplifying rare-earth-doped multimode fiber and in multimode fiber laser. I believe that this could lead to the new building blocks of high power picosecond or femtosecond fiber lasers. XLIM is an interdisciplinary institute, hosting various fields of research. It is recognised as one of the top institutions in photonics and micro-electronics, and since 2011 has been considered as a “Laboratoire d’Excellence” by the French government. XLIM can therefore provide for an excellent environment in which I can conduct the proposed research while also achieving the required training, communication and dissemination objectives of the MSCA Fellowship.

The EUCERMAT strategic partnership is an educational programme promoting the science of ceramics in Europe by sharing, developing and transferring innovative practices among universities and enhancing novelty in the field of trainings and research. The principal aim of this programme is then to achieve greater impact and visibility of innovative ceramic materials in Europe in order to stimulate this economic sector and in parallel to increase the natural enrolment of students in this disciplinary field.EUCERMAT promotes a strong synergy between industries and the leading universities working in this field in Europe. This partnership has set up, at master level, modern teaching methods integrating industrial prerogatives which are based on specialties of excellence of the participating universities. The partnership also manages innovative research projects between companies and universities in which the selected students are involved.The aim is therefore both to promote the image of ceramics among young people (high school pupils) and general public and to train highly qualified researchers likely to make a useful and powerful contribution in industrial innovations.The EUCERMAT program, coordinated by the University of Limoges, gathered together 13 European partners: 5 universities, 2 research institutes, 4 companies, 1 European learned society, 1 High school.The activities carried out during the three years of the project allowed:•To promote the science of ceramic materials thanks to the development of new pedagogical tools for high schools and specific promoting tools towards the general public. The goal is here clearly to attract more students in this field in the higher educational system. During this program, we benefited from the support of a renowned American institution (American Ceramic Society) which has been working on this topic for a few years. This work, which gathered together teachers from the high schools, academics from universities and industrials aims at building a bridge between secondary and higher educational system, clarifying in that way the training offers in the field of ceramic materials. A network of 15 European high schools has been set up and an educational program in materials science was designed for pupils involved in the last two years of the scientific classrooms. A pedagogical tool consisting in a ‘kit of knowledge’ encompassing few scientific experiences aiming to show the main properties of materials have been distributed in the high school network to initiate pedagogical collaboration.•To set up of a common training offer in English at the Master's level. The choice of courses was established in agreement with the industrial partners. Each university of the project provides an e-learning training module representative of the best skills of universities completed by a week session of practical work taking the research aspects to students.•To strengthen the functioning of the knowledge triangle in the field of ceramics sciences, through the creation of a European industrial network (14 Companies) offering funded research internships to second-year master's students. The research themes of the internships were established in agreement with the academic research laboratories (universities or institutes). The strategy developed is very innovative since these actions involve academic and industrial partners sharing long-standing cooperation (forming ‘active cells’) which guarantees the excellence of the research activities for students selected to participate to the program. The networking of the partners makes it possible to encourage European collaborations together with pooling of resources and skills.Each year, about 15 students belonging to the 5 universities participate to this programme (master level e-learning teaching programme and industrial internships) and 200 pupils and 50 teachers are concerned by the pedagogical activities towards high-schools. Research activities are impacting the 5 laboratories associated to the universities and the 2 research institutes that are partners of the programme.The EUCERMAT program has developed tools and resources which can now be used to ensure its sustainability.•At the level of innovative practices in communication around ceramics, the network of high schools and the synergy of functioning with universities are now settled and will be maintained thanks to the collaborations and to the educational tools developed within the framework of the program.•Regarding the teaching and research activities for master's students (the educational master’s programme), the courses are now created and are available by e-learning teaching hosted on Moodle platform and the business network will have its own interest in proposing new research topic each year and funded research internship for students.As a consequence the EUCERMAT activities are maintained today.

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies and overall numerical fabrication methods have been recognized by stakeholders as the next industrial revolution bringing customers’ needs and suppliers’ offers closer. It cannot be dissociated to the present trends in increased virtualization, cloud approaches and collaborative developments (i.e. sharing of resources). AM is likely to be one good option paving the way to Europe re-industrialization and increased competitiveness. AMITIE will reinforce European capacities in the AM field applied to ceramic-based products. Through its extensive programme of transnational and intersectoral secondments, AMITIE will promote fast technology transfer and enable as well training of AM experts from upstream research down to more technical issues. This will provide Europe with specialists of generic skills having a great potential of knowledge-based careers considering present growing needs for AM industry development. To do that, AMITIE brings together leading academic and industrial European players in the fields of materials science/processes, materials characterizations, AM technologies and associated numerical simulations, applied to the fabrication of functional and/or structural ceramic-based materials for energy/transport, and ICTs applications, as well as biomaterials. Those players will develop a new concept of smart factory for the future based on 3D AM technologies (i.e. powder bed methods, robocasting, inkjet printing, stereolithography, etc.) and their possible hybridization together or with subtractive technologies (e.g. laser machining). It will allow for the production of parts whose dimensions, shapes, functionality and assembly strategies may be tailored to address today’s key technological issues of the fabrication of high added value objects following a fully-combinatorial route. This is expected to lead to a new paradigm for production of multiscale, multimaterial and multifunctional components and systems