Interview, special to DVN
Christophe Le-Ligné is the CTO of Valeo’s Visibility Systems business group, and since this past July he directly lead the R&D activities of the Lighting Systems product group, replacing Laurent Evrard.
DVN : You’re working away in the lighting community, but your name might not be familiar to some of our readers. Will you tell us about yourself?
Christophe Le Ligné: I hold an engineering degree in Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering from ENSEA, that is École Nationale Supérieure de l’Électronique et de Ses Applications, or National School of Electronics and its Applications— a graduate school near Paris.
I began my career in the Automotive industry at SAGEM (Société d’Applications Générales de l’Électricité et de la Mécanique, i.e., General Electricity and Mechanics Applications Company) in 1988, where I worked on instrument clusters and navigation systems. Then I joined Japanese consumer electronics company kenwood in 1996 as an R&D manager in charge of car audio systems. In 1998 I became manager of electronics and advance engineering at Eaton Corporation, which became Delphi Mechatronics Systems in 2002. Until 2006 I was in charge of product engineering for Southern Europe. I also spent some time at Siemens VDO as a program manager on car audio and navigation systems.