Valentina Emiliani is a CNRS research director at the Vision Institute in Paris. After a PhD in physics at La Sapienza University (Rome) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Born Institute (Berlin) and at the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (Florence) she joined in 2002 the Institute Jacques Monod (Paris). In 2005 she received the European Young Investigator grant and formed the Wavefront Engineering Microscopy group at Paris Descartes University. In 2019, she moved with her team to the Vision Institute, where she also directs the Photonics Department.

Valentina and her group have pioneered the use of wave-front engineering for neuroscience. Precisely, they have combined approaches such as computer-generated holography, generalized phase contrast and temporal focusing with optogenetics to control neuronal activity with unprecedent spatiotemporal precision. Their findings paved the way to optogenetic manipulation of intact brain circuits with single cell resolution: an essential methodology to perturb and activate neural circuits for interrogating brain function.

She has received the Award "Coups d'élan pour la recherche française" from the Bettencourt-Shueller foundation in 2015, the Axa Chair in 2017, the ERC advanced Grant in 2021, the "Médaille d'argent" from CNRS and the Maxime Dahan Prize in 2021. She received the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award in 2022.