[1] The recipient of the de Gennes Prize receives £5000, a medal and certificate and completes a UK lecture tour.
After graduating in 1955 from Ecole Normale, de Gennes was a research engineer at the Atomic Energy Centre (Saclay).
During his time at Orsay de Gennes worked on superconductors and liquid crystals.
[2] In 1991, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for studying the boundary lines between order and disorder in materials like liquid crystals.
[3] After receiving the Nobel Prize, de Gennes visited roughly 200 high schools over a two-year period, from 1992 to 1994, in which he delivered talks on science, innovation and common sense to the students.