In short
Fluid mechanics and hydraulics professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Curriculum
I have both a PhD and an engineering degree granted by the École Centrale de Paris and Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INP Grenoble, Grenoble National Polytechnic Institute). Trained as a hydraulics engineer, I did my doctoral work under the supervision of Pierre Evesque and co-supervision from Philippe Coussot from Dec. 1994 to July 1997 on rheology of granular flows in simple shearing. I was recruited in March 1998 as a researcher (rheology) at the Cemagref (now Irstea), which has since become the laboratoire “Storm Erosion, Snow and Avalanche Laboratory”. Parallel to this research activity, with Claude Charlier I set up a consulting firm for engineering contracting called Toraval (avalanche and torrent protection), which has become the major player in this field in France. Among other things, we developed the first numerical models based on the depth-averaged equations for engineering applications.
Current status
Since 2003, I have been a fluid-mechanics professor at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne and I am the director of the Environmental Hydraulics Laboratory. My major area of interest is the dynamics of particle flows, mainly the natural suspensions involved in geophysical flows such as avalanches, mudflows, and bedload transport. I am a member of the Society of Rheology, the American Geophysical Union. I am a reviewer for the American Physical Society, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the American Geophysical Union, Journal of Rheology, etc. From 2004 on, I have been an associate editor of Water Resources Research, one of the leading journals in the field, and as of Jan. 2016, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth (both published by AGU and Wiley).