Meet Lionel Martellini, Director of the EDHEC Quantum Institute, who bridges the gap between physics and finance

Before addressing the stars with the formal ‘vous’ (out of respect), Lionel Martellini was first immersed in poetry. “I feel a deep sense of loyalty to the memory of my parents,” he confides. “They were exceptionally kind and intelligent people who, even though they had both left school at a very young age, always placed great importance on intellectual pursuits, particularly poetry and science. ” And not just any poetry: that of Aragon, or rather the poems of the latter set to music by Jean Ferrat (his mother’s choice) and Léo Ferré (his father’s).

From a very early age, Lionel was struck by the emotion these texts evoked in his father, a farmer whose robust and imposing stature did little to conceal an immense intellectual finesse. “This instilled in me a sort of hierarchy of values: material things mattered little; what counted was a form of nobility of spirit, an ability to appreciate beauty, which was also centred on my father’s love of science, scientific rigour and discovery. ” Noblesse oblige: these two polarities, poetry and science, very early on became two defining forces of attraction.

And so, faced with his first major decision—that of choosing a path after A-levels—Lionel hesitated for a long time between the route of hypokhâgne and that of the science preparatory class. Coming from a family of modest means but rich in dreams, he could not bring himself to choose between a path he knew was hardly viable and one in which he saw no pleasure. All the more so as his true passion, physics, had left him with a rather bitter taste: the teaching of the subject at school was limited to tedious calculations, a far cry from the promise of uncovering the laws of the universe that his childhood reading had led him to believe in.

He therefore opted for a third path and enrolled in a business preparatory course, which quickly led him to ESCP, which he joined in 1987. What followed were three years of a life he describes as pleasant but which was far from intellectually fulfilling. He did, however, develop an interest in finance, having a particular aptitude for mathematics. His first work placements mainly served to close doors. “In the early 1990s, for many people, a career in finance meant being a trader on a trading floor—the myth of Wall Street and the big American bank,” he explains. “My time at JP Morgan confirmed that this wasn’t the path for me at all: for me, it was terribly lacking in meaning and substance.” On the contrary, he dreamed of physics, spending his evenings poring over the course prospectuses he’d collected during the day whilst scouring the corridors of various Parisian universities. So, upon leaving ESCP, he set himself a challenge to serve as his guiding star: to be the first business school graduate to become a physicist. “I knew full well that none of it made any sense,” he comments, “but at the same time, I had a hunch that it would set me in motion and lead me to the right place.”

With his dreams as his driving force but the sense of responsibility he inherited from his parents acting as a safeguard, Lionel had to find a credible path forward. He quickly identified mathematics as the common language of finance and physics, a bridge that would enable him to excel in the former whilst drawing closer to the latter. Thus, in 1990, he joined ENSAE, a school of mathematics and statistics applied to economics and finance. At the same time, he enrolled for a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in pure mathematics at the University of Paris 6, moving from the prospectus to actual study. He took a break of a year and a half, between 1993 and 1994, during which he worked as a financial engineer at the Banque de Paris in Montreal; it was there that he met his future wife, who – believe it or not – was then training to be an astrophysicist!

In his final year at ENSAE, he managed in a matter of months what some might spend half a lifetime contemplating: the completion of his engineering degree in Economics and Statistics, the renowned El Karoui Master’s in Probability, as well as a Master’s in Celestial Mechanics and Fundamental Astronomy, which he had “the weakness to accept”, as he humbly explains. There was certainly no question of weakness, as Lionel had managed to convince them that his background in statistics and his experience in modelling three-body problems during an internship at the Nice Observatory could be of use to them. He would not complete the latter, at least not at the time, but he would successfully complete the other two.

He describes his next chapter as the one in which he “decided to get serious” and began a PhD in mathematics applied to finance. For someone whose initial plan had been to “spend his life learning things and move seamlessly from student life to retirement”, an academic career certainly had its merits. So, in 1995, he began a PhD under the supervision of Nicole El Karoui, a leading figure in financial mathematics, and at the same time took his first steps at EDHEC as an Assistant Professor.

It was another dream, perhaps another one inherited from his parents, that changed the course of his life two years later: in 1997, he answered the call from the US and abandoned his PhD in mathematics to pursue a PhD in finance at the University of Berkeley. Between a New Year’s Eve celebration in 2000 with his wife on an astronomical observation mission under the starry skies of the Atacama (Chile) and the exciting Californian lifestyle, this three-year experience could not have gone better. So much so that he decided to extend it: he defended his thesis in 2000 before accepting a post at USC in Los Angeles, which he held until 2003.

Remaining loyal to those who had supported him in his early academic career, he returned to France to join EDHEC at the start of the 2003 academic year, at the invitation of Noël Amenc, another finance professor with whom he embarked on the great adventure of the EDHEC-Risk Institute: “We both shared a common background – both from Nice and from humble beginnings – as well as the same ambition: to build a world-renowned research centre with the desire to make a real-world impact, to break free from the ivory towers that academic centres all too often become, unable to see beyond their own campuses. ” This venture would last for over twenty years, with Lionel taking the helm of the centre from 2015 to 2022, when it became the EDHEC Climate Institute. During this period, he focused his research on investment solutions: ‘useful finance’ that enables individuals to find solutions to concrete problems (financing consumption, planning for retirement). Lionel and his colleagues thus harnessed the full machinery of finance (mathematics, statistics, financial theory) to provide academically sound answers to these real societal needs.

A professor and director of a major financial research centre, where on earth has the student who wanted to be a physicist gone? If the accolades and numerous publications in the field of finance are anything to go by, his mother is certainly not mistaken either. When asked by friends at the time what had become of her youngest son, she replied without hesitation, “Lionel is a poet and an astrophysicist”. Perplexed and amused, her son questioned her, but she stood her ground: “Professor of finance, that’s what you do. What interests me is who you are”. The truth, in this case, comes from the parents’ mouths for the man who has never ceased to journey and strive to “become what he is”, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase.

In 2011, EDHEC sought to accelerate the expansion of its activities and partnerships in the United States, and Lionel was sent there to act as an ambassador. He spent a year on the campus of the prestigious Princeton University. ‘Prestigious’ does not do it justice: its walls have witnessed entire chapters of the history of physics, and its Institute for Advanced Study has welcomed Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann and the great logician Kurt Gödel, author of a famous solution to Einstein’s equations involving closed timelike curves. Lionel attended two doctoral courses as an auditor: one on general relativity, and one on cosmology, delivered by one of the discipline’s founding fathers, Paul Steinhardt. He describes those student mornings simply as “the finest of his life”. There is indeed something almost mystical about them, or perhaps a sense of destiny: that of the dreamer who finally encounters his dream. “It was absolutely extraordinary on an intellectual level,” he sums up, his eyes still shining at the memory of that experience.

Back in France, he simply couldn’t leave it at that. He got in touch with an astrophysicist at the Nice Observatory, where he had worked as an intern during his first year at ENSAE, and told her about his crazy idea: if, by any chance, a research project were to come up where someone with a strong background in probability and statistics, and some knowledge of physics, relativity and cosmology, might be useful… He therefore enrolled as a PhD student in astrophysics at the Université Côte d’Azur at a time when the discipline was on the verge of one of its greatest breakthroughs. In the right place at the right time, Lionel took part, alongside 2,000 other researchers worldwide, in the very first detection of gravitational waves, officially recorded on 14 September 2015. To call it a historic moment would be an understatement: it is quite simply the dawn of a new era for astrophysics and cosmology, a turning point in our understanding of the fundamental workings of the Universe.

“It was truly wonderful,” he explains. “I feel immense gratitude and humility at having been part of this discovery. Although my work focused on an exploratory topic, there were three months during which only 2,000 people worldwide knew what we had discovered. 2,000… and my parents.” He completed his thesis in 2019, after rewriting it at the request of a member of the examination board who felt it was too mathematical and not physical enough.

How does one pursue a career as a professor of finance whilst also being associated with one of the greatest discoveries in the history of astrophysics? “I make a very clear distinction: finance is my profession, physics is my passion. So I’ve developed a sort of routine around that: four days a week at EDHEC, and Fridays and weekends devoted to physics. It’s this balance that has allowed me to be happy and to cultivate my intellectual freedom.” Whilst gravitational waves have had less of an impact on Lionel’s life than on the history of astrophysics, they have not been without significance for him: in 2022, he stepped down as director of the EDHEC Risk Institute just as it was repositioning itself in the field of climate finance, and took advantage of this transition to take a one-year sabbatical at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Through his work with extraordinary physicists such as Seth Lloyd at MIT and Jacob Barandes at Harvard, he has immersed himself completely in quantum mechanics and the problem of time at the infinitesimal scale, thereby fulfilling a dream he has held for nearly 40 years. With several joint publications to his name, he now spends his Fridays studying not gravitational waves but quantum time.

But whereas his early forays into physics were merely a “hobby”, as he puts it, quantum physics has managed to bring together the Lionel of Fridays and the Lionel of the rest of the week: since November 2025, he has been at the helm of the brand-new EDHEC Quantum Institute, which he founded to help organisations and society as a whole understand the transformations brought about by the second quantum revolution. “This is my synthesis,” he reflects. “I am finally becoming who I am, that is to say, someone who has spent his life trying to understand and improve the workings of the financial industry and has taken a keen interest in fundamental physics in order to now build a bridge between the two.”

He sees this new institute as a legacy he is leaving to an institution that has given him so muchand within which hefeels he has experienced extraordinary adventures. A final chapter for a man who still has many more to write. “ Ultimately, I am probably someone who is not entirely a physicist, but who is interested enough in physics to reflect on what it tells us that is useful both for the real world and for society. I still know far less about physics than I do about finance, but it’s an adventure I take very seriously.” A bit of a physicist but not yet a poet, he therefore still has some way to go before becoming fully what he is.

Selected publications

Finance

• Efficient Decumulation Investing and Applications to a New Generation of Fully Amortizing Retirement Solutions — Journal of Portfolio Management, 2025.
• Back to The Funding Ratio! Addressing the Duration Puzzle and Retirement Income Risk of Defined Contribution Pension Plans — Journal of Banking and Finance, 2024.
• Improving Interest Rate Risk Hedging Strategies Through Regularization — Financial Analysts Journal, 2022.
• A Reinterpretation of the Optimal Demand for Risky Assets in Fund Separation Theorems — Management Science, 2018.
• A Model-Free Measure of Aggregate Idiosyncratic Volatility and the Prediction of Market Returns — Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2014.
• Improved Estimates of Higher-Order Comoments and Implications for Portfolio Selection — Review of Financial Studies, 2010.

Physics

• Quantum Arrival Times in Free Fall — Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2025.
• Time-of-Arrival Distributions for Continuous Quantum Systems and Application to Quantum Backflow — Physical Review A, 2024.
• Quantum Delay in the Time-of-Arrival of Free-Falling Atoms — Physical Review A, 2024.
• Efficiency of the Cross-Correlation Statistic for Gravitational Wave Stochastic Background Signals with non-Gaussian Noise and Heterogeneous Detector Sensitivities — Physical Review D, 2015.

Key dates

Since 2025: Director, EDHEC Quantum Institute

Since 2025: Director of Research, CFA Institute Research Foundation

Since 2006: Professor, EDHEC Business School

2022–2023: Visiting Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States)

2015–2022: Director, EDHEC-Risk Institute

2016–2017: Co-recipient (LIGO/Virgo international collaboration) — Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016), Gruber Cosmology Prize (2016) and Princess of the Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2017)

2013–2019: PhD in Relativistic Astrophysics, Université Côte d’Azur (France)

2011–2012: Visiting Professor, Princeton University (United States)

2003–2006: Associate Professor, EDHEC Business School

2000–2003: Assistant Professor, University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business (United States)

1997–2000: PhD in Finance, University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business

1995–1997: Assistant Professor, EDHEC Business School

1994–1995: Master’s in Probability and Applications (‘Master El Karoui’), Sorbonne University (UPMC)

1993–1994: Financial Engineer, Banque Nationale de Paris, Montreal (Quebec)

1992–1994: Master’s in Mathematics, Pure Mathematics track, Sorbonne University (UPMC)

1990–1992: Bachelor’s in Mathematics, Sorbonne University (UPMC)

1990–1995: Engineering Degree (ENSAE Paris), Economics & Statistics – Finance stream, ENSAE Paris

1987–1990: Master’s in Management (Financial Accounting stream), ESCP Business School

1985–1987: Preparatory class for the Grandes Écoles, Lycée Masséna, Nice

To learn more about Lionel Martellini

• See his webpage on edhec.edu
• Go to Google Scholar
• Reach his profile on Linkedin