Professor Fabrice Pierron PhD

Professor of Solid Mechanics, Head of Materials Group

Professor Fabrice Pierron is Professor of Solid Mechanics within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.

Current position
I am currently Professor of Solid Mechanics at the University of Southampton (since May 2012). I belong to the Structures and Solid Mechanics theme and have strong connections with the engineering materials, bioengineering, fluid-structure interaction and ISVR research groups.

Honours, Awards and Esteem

• Editor-in-Chief of Strain (Wiley) since 2010.
• Wolfson Research Merit Award holder (2012-17)
• EPSRC Established Career Fellowship holder (2014-19)
• Fellow of the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM, www.sem.org), 2012.

Publications (March 2017)

• 108 refereed journal articles
• 1 book (Virtual Fields Method)
• h-index of 34 (Scopus)
• ResearchID: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/D-2332-2011
• ORCID: 0000-0003-2813-4994

Career history
I graduated from ENSEM in Nancy, France, in 1989, with a major in mechanical engineering. During my degree, I was an exchange student in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath (UK) as a third year undergraduate. I then embarked on a PhD programme partly funded by the EU programme BRITE/EURAM and shared between the University of Bath and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de St-Etienne (ENSM.SE, France). I got my PhD from Claude Bernard University in Lyon in 1994 (to which ENSM.SE was affiliated for postgraduate studies).

After a short post-doctoral period at ENSM.SE, I was awarded a lectureship there (1994-1999). During this period, I continued my collaboration with Professor Alain Vautrin and started seminal work on the Virtual Fields Method (see project pages) with Professor Michel Grédiac and initiation to optical methods with Dr Yves Surrel. I was awarded an ‘Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches’ (HDR) in 1999 from Clermont-Ferrand University (to which ENSM.SE was also affiliated), the French degree to access professorial rank.

I then moved on to my first full professor position in 1999 at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers (ENSAM, France), Châlons-en-Champagne campus, at the age of 33, one of the youngest full professors in mechanical engineering in France at the time. I was tasked to create a research laboratory (LMPF) from scratch, which I did, hiring researchers, attracting funding to buy equipment and obtaining recognition from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research in 2001. I led LMPF for 6 years, after which I stepped down to lead one of the two research groups until my departure to Southampton in 2012. I was promoted to first class professor in 2006, again one of the youngest in France at the time. In 2004-2005, I spent a year at the University of Bristol on a sabbatical, funded by the EPSRC.