Postdoctoral positions in theoretical physics

The ENS is a grande école and, as such, is not part of the mainstream university system. However, the vast majority of the academic staff hosted at ENS belong to external institutions such as one of the Parisian universities, the CNRS and the EHESS. This mechanism for constant scientific turnover allows ENS to benefit from a continuous stream of researchers in all fields. ENS full professorships are rare and competitive. Generalistic in its recruitment and organisation, the ENS is the only grande école in France to have departments of research in all the natural, social, and human sciences.

Its alumni include 14 Nobel Prize laureates (ENS has the highest proportion of Nobel laureates among its alumni of any institution worldwide^[12]), of which 8 are in Physics, 12 Fields Medalists, more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal (France's highest scientific prize) and several hundred members of the Institut de France, and scores of politicians and statesmen.^[13][14] The school has achieved particular recognition in the fields of mathematics and physics as one of France's foremost scientific training grounds, along with international notability in the human sciences as the spiritual birthplace of authors such as Julien Gracq, Jean Giraudoux, Assia Djebar, and Charles Péguy, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alain Badiou, social scientists such as Émile Durkheim, Raymond Aron, and Pierre Bourdieu, and "French theorists" such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.^[15][16][17] The school's students are often referred to as normaliens.^[10][11]