Bernard Gil, born 1957, is Director of Research of Exceptional Class at CNRS (France), Honorary Professor of the University Meijo (Nagoya, Japan), Honorary Professor of the State University of St-Petersburg (Russia).

He is an experimentalist working on lightmatter interaction processes in III-V and II-VI semiconductor compounds. After some years spent working on cubic semiconductors, he shifted his interest in 1994 to wurtzite wide bandgap semiconductors for understanding the emission of light in compact solid-state diodes based on nitrides. Since 2015 he is more intensively focused to boron nitride and other two-dimensional semiconductors of the III-VI family, namely InSe, GaSe and GaTe. Gil contributed to the organization of tens of international events and contributed to the launching of several series semiconductor conferences: Int. Conf. on Nitride Sem., Int. Workshop on Nitride Sem., Phys. of Light Matt.Coupling in Nanostructures, and etc. Gil is Doctor Honoris Causa of the Saint Petersburg Univ. and of the Meijo Univ.of Nagoya. In 2016 he became Megagrant Winner (Ioffe Institute, St-Petersburg, Russia) 2016. In 2018 he was awarded the Welker Prize.