Dr. Jean-Michel Ménard is an Associate Professor in the department of physics at the University of Ottawa where in 2016 he founded the Ultrafast THz laboratory hosting photonics systems for materials characterization.

He received a PhD in physics from the University of Toronto in 2011 before completing two postdoctoral research positions at the University of Regensburg and the at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. Dr. Ménard is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, a fellow of the uOttawa-NRC Joint Center for Extreme Photonics (JCEP), and a fellow of the uOttawa-Max Planck Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics. In 2022, he received the Early Researcher Award of Ontario, he was awarded the Senior Fellowship of the Bayreuth Humboldt Center, and he held the Ulrich Bonse Visiting Chair for Instrumentation at the University of Dortmund. His research lies at the crossroads of THz photonics, experimental condensed matter physics and nonlinear optics.

Projects in his group are interdisciplinary and often conducted in collaboration with world-renown Canadian companies. His current research interest focuses on low-photon-number THz photonics and strongly-coupled quantum systems.