Laurent Simons

Laurent Simons was born on December 26, 2009, in Ostend, Belgium. He completed primary school at six and secondary school at eight. In a 2025 interview with Norwegian higher-education outlet Khrono, he described enjoying learning and working through course materials at his own pace.⁠[1]

Simons studied electrical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. In December 2019, his parents withdrew him following a disagreement over the completion schedule. The university said finishing the outstanding requirements before his tenth birthday was unrealistic. He left without an Eindhoven bachelor’s degree.⁠[2]

The University of Antwerp confirmed in 2021 that eleven-year-old Simons had completed a physics bachelor’s degree with the highest distinction. VRT and Belga reported that he finished the normally three-year program in about one year and had already taken some master’s courses.⁠[3]

The Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics described Simons’s six-week internship with the attoworld team associated with the institute and LMU Munich. He worked in the BIRD research area, learning about Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and analysis of blood’s molecular composition. In the interview, he connected laser technology with an interest in medical research and a future ambition to study artificial organs.⁠[4]

On September 23, 2022, twelve-year-old Simons received his physics master’s diploma at the University of Antwerp with the highest distinction. His 2021–2022 master’s thesis, Analog physics with excitations in Bose-Einstein Condensates, was supervised by Jacques Tempere and Michiel Wouters and concerned excitations in Bose–Einstein condensates and analog physics.⁠[5][6]

Simons, Wouters and Tempere submitted an arXiv preprint on polarons in supersolids. Using a variational path-integral approach, they calculated ground-state energy and polaron size for an impurity in a one-dimensional dipolar supersolid and examined possible localization within a single droplet under particular interactions. The work concerns the theory of ultracold many-body systems.⁠[7]

Simons said in a 2025 interview that he began doctoral research in medicine at Helmholtz Munich that January. His Ertürk Lab profile lists him as a doctoral candidate in medicine, with interests in whole-body imaging and the intersection of physics and medicine. This is separate from his completed physics doctorate at Antwerp.⁠[1][8]

Simons, Ralf Klemt, Tilman Pfau, Wouters and Tempere submitted Optical response of the supersolid polaron, subsequently published in Physical Review Research 7, L032033. The paper calculates impurity absorption spectra and proposes using an ionic impurity’s optical response to probe supersolid excitations. Its spectral features concern excitation modes in a quantum system, rather than a general medical-imaging result.⁠[9]

At fifteen, Simons completed his doctoral defence in the University of Antwerp’s Department of Physics. His thesis, Bose polarons in superfluids and supersolids, was supervised by Tempere and Wouters. It studies charged Bose polarons and impurities in supersolid backgrounds, including ground-state properties and absorption spectra. The university’s defence record is corroborated by a subsequent interview; he turned sixteen that December.⁠[10][11][1]

RTL Tonight published an interview with Simons whose description confirmed his Antwerp doctoral defence that Monday and presented extending human life and pursuing immortality as ambitions he wanted to explore. These are the interviewee’s long-term aspirations; the program does not establish a developed longevity treatment or demonstrated clinical benefit.⁠[12]

Simons is the second-listed coauthor of the bioRxiv preprint DISCO-seq: 3D single-cell transcriptomics of intact biological systems. The work combines tissue clearing, three-dimensional imaging of intact organs or organisms, and transcriptomic analysis, with demonstrations involving mouse glioblastoma and protein-deposition mapping. The cited version is a preprint, and these mouse studies do not directly establish therapeutic effects in humans.⁠[13]

Simons’s physics work examines impurities interacting with Bose gases, particularly polarons in superfluids and supersolids. His medical research interests include whole-body imaging and tissue analysis. These lines of work are documented separately through his doctoral thesis, physics papers and a biology preprint.⁠[10][8][13]

Laboratory profile: https://www.erturk-lab.com/team/laurent-simons/ (opens in a new window). University of Antwerp Theory of Quantum Systems group: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/theory-of-quantum-sy/ (opens in a new window). Physics paper record: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21018 (opens in a new window).⁠[8][6][9]