ENSTA Paris


The ENSTA Paris, formerly known as the École nationale supérieure de techniques avancées is a prestigious French graduate school of engineering. Founded in 1741, it is the oldest "grande école" in France. It is located in Palaiseau in the south of Paris, on the Paris-Saclay campus, and is a constituent faculty of the Paris Institute of Technology. Every year some 180 engineers graduate from the school.
ENSTA affords its students a general training course in engineering with the aim of enabling them to design and produce complex systems while meeting strict economic constraints. To this end, the school provides high-level scientific and technological training. The teaching is given by research professors with the participation of numerous auxiliary teachers from the economic and industrial world familiar with the latest technical developments in a wide variety of fields. The general nature of the training on offer enables ENSTA graduates to find a career in various sectors such as the automotive or naval industry, networks and telecommunications, space propulsion, robotics, oceanology and the environment.
Research, one of the school's primary missions, makes a significant contribution to both fundamental and applied fields, meeting the needs of businesses and also contributing to the school's scholarly outlook. Roughly half of the research at the school is the responsibility of the school's research professors, and the other half is carried out by researchers from the CNRS, the INSERM and the École polytechnique working at ENSTA premises.

History

Originally, the school was the brainchild of Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, inspector general of the Navy. He had identified the need to give the Navy's master carpenters a theoretical education, particularly in mathematics and physics, which were making quick progress, so that they would have a clearer understanding of their trade.
Duhamel du Monceau founded the first school in his home in Paris on the Isle Saint Louis in 1741. This date is recognised as the origin of the institution. In 1748 it was moved to the royal library on rue Richelieu, and in 1753 to the Louvre Palace, immediately adjacent to the Académie des Sciences. It was closed in 1759 during the Seven Years' War. In 1765, he managed to persuade the duc de Choiseul to reopen it as part of a sweeping overhaul of the navy. Duhamel du Monceau continued to run the school for the rest of his life.
The School of Student Engineer Constructors, as it was known, was closed in 1793 during the French Revolution. It reopened in 1795 as an application school for the Ecole Polytechnique. Later on, it became known as Ecole nationale supérieure du Génie Maritime.
In 1970, the Délégation Générale pour l'Armement merged the school with three of its other establishments:
- the École Nationale Supérieure des Poudres
- the École Nationale Supérieure de l'Armement
- the École des Ingénieurs Hydrographes de la Marine.
This formed the École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées, the role of which is to train engineers in the naval, mechanical, nuclear, chemical, electronic and related fields. The scientific skills of each of the founding institutes survives in the broad range of research disciplines covered at ENSTA, as well as in the more general nature of its teaching and the variety of specialities offered to the students.
Today, ENSTA's legal status is that of a "public administrative establishment", placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Defence. It is headed by a general officer of the Corps of Ordnance Ingineers. Some former graduates of École polytechnique attend ENSTA before joining the military Corps of Ordnance Ingineers, which staffs the DGA.

Academics

Military and Politics