She is an Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University and a Senior Member, since 1999, and administrator (2004–2011) of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Her discoveries over the past thirty years provide various long-term fundamental and technological advances in biomedicine, Solar energy or chip design.
She highlighted that collective chemical and physical intrinsic properties emerge from such 3D superlattices called colloid crystals or supracrystals.
Furthermore, such suprastructures target different compartments of the tumor microenvironment and trigger local photothermal damages that are inaccessible for isolated nanocrystals and not predicted by global temperature measurements.
She is the daughter of Christophe Pileni, Administrator in Chief of the École nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer, and of Marie-Pasquine Micheletti, President of the French Red Cross.
She was director, between 1996 and 2000, of the Structure and Reactivity of Interfaces Laboratory (SRI), a Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) joint unit.