Cardiff University

Faculty Member, Engineering

Professor

Engineering

About

Born in Paris, France in 1975, I joined the Civil Engineering team at Cardiff University on 1st September 2009, as a Professor, after three years as a lecturer in Glasgow University.

I spent three years at the Laboratory of Structural and Continuum Mechanics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, under the support of Professor Thomas Zimmermann working then on meshfree point collocation methods and partition of unity enrichment (extended finite elements) with applications to geomechanics.

In 2003, I graduated in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University under the guidance of Professor Brian Moran. My thesis, funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, concentrated on applications of the extended finite element method (XFEM) to damage tolerance analysis of complex structures, casting design and biofilm growth processes. In addition to the unique support of Professor Moran, this work would never have been possible without Professor James Conley and Professor David Chopp as well as the instruction of Professor Ted Belytschko.

In 1999, through a joint graduate programme of the French Institute of Technology (Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publics) and the American Northwestern University I complete a dual M.Sc. after a thesis work on Time Domain Reflectometry simulation to assess ground movements with Professor Charles H. Dowding.

My areas of expertise are:
Computational mechanics and applied mathematics with an emphasis on moving discontinuities (mechanics of fracture, biofilm and tumour growth, etc.)

Method development (enriched/extended finite elements, meshfree methods, smooth strain finite elements)

Evolving discontinuities (level set methods, partition of unity enrichment

Academic research/industrial applications: bridging the gap (porting novel methods to industrial codes, real-world applications of computational mechanics and novel method development)

High Performance Computing

Surgical Simulation (Brain surgery)

Biomechanics

Microstructurally-faithful material modelling

Multiscale simulation

Model Reduction techniques

Contact Information