From Lyon to Montréal: notes on running an architecture lab on two continents
Five years after moving the group from École Centrale de Lyon to Concordia, a brief inventory of what travelled, what did not, and what we built locally.
When the group moved from Lyon to Montréal in 2019, the first surprise was how little of the infrastructure travelled. Equipment, test benches, even simulation licences are inherently local. What did travel were the open questions and the standards by which we measure progress.
Five years on, the local environment has shaped the agenda in ways I did not anticipate. The proximity of Polytechnique Montréal’s silicon-photonics group has made device-level collaboration far easier than it was in Lyon, and visiting students from that group now spend long periods in our offices. The Gina Cody School’s FPGA infrastructure is excellent, which has tilted us further toward hardware-in-the-loop validation.
If a peer were considering a similar move, the advice I would give is simple: budget two years for the lab to settle, and use them to write. Papers travel better than people.
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