Jean-Claude Garreau received his PhD from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1989 and joined CNRS in 1991, where he was a First Class Directeur de Recherche (senior researcher) when he retired in 2023. hHe started the Physics of Laser-Cooled Atoms Group (comprising seven permanent researchers) in the Physics Department of the Université de Lille, which developed an internationally-recognized expertise in quantum chaos and quantum disorder using the cold-atom realization of the paradigmatic system known as quantum kicked rotor as a quantum simulator.