Each year, the Métropole de Lyon, in partnership with the Université de Lyon, awards young researchers prizes to promote scientific excellence in Lyon.

The Young Researcher Prize, created in the 1980s by the Ville de Lyon, aims to promote excellence in basic and applied research in the Université de Lyon's laboratories. Each year, around fifty young researchers apply.

The prizes are awarded to post-docs under the age of 35 in three themes that encompass all disciplinary fields: "biohealth and society", "science and engineering" and "humanities and urbanity".

On October 9, 2018, the "Science and engineering" prize was awarded to Pol Grasland-Mongrain.

Pol Grasland-Mongrain is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the physics laboratory at the ENS de Lyon where he is now working on a new method called "Cellquake elastography" inspired by the techniques used by seismologists to probe the Earth.

This technique makes it possible to measure the elasticity, the "hardness", of a biological cell.