Philippe ROUX, ISTerre
Scientific coordinator, Research Director CNRS
As one of M. FINK’s former student (from 1994 to 1997), and then as one of his team member when recruited as a Research Associate at CNRS (from 1998 to 2001), Philippe ROUX was educated in sciences with an interdisciplinary approach for wave propagation in complex media where small scale and large scale experiments always merge together at some point.
Philippe ROUX is an experimentalist with a strong background in ultrasonics, underwater acoustics, and geophysics. In 2004, he was a Research Associate at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (San Diego), where he built the ultrasonic laboratory. During that time, he developed laboratory experiments in the MHz regime, to complement or anticipate experimental data obtained at sea. That same year, he became a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). His research then turned toward the spatio-temporal coherence of ambient noise in underwater acoustics and geophysics, which led to his arrival at ISTerre in 2005. That year, he received an ANR Junior Grant that helped him to build his own acoustic laboratory and acoustic team at ISTerre. This new start induced the evolution of his research axis from wave physics to geophysics, as maybe expected for a local environment that is clearly oriented toward Earth sciences. His interactions with San Diego are still strong, as he has also spent 1 month each year there since 2005. Due to this strong collaboration, he was awarded the Medwin Prize in Acoustical Oceanography (by the ASA) in 2013.
In 2009, he was promoted to Research Director at the age of 40, and he is a previous recipient of the ‘Reward for Scientific Excellence’, which he gained in 2010. In 2012, he took the lead of the Waves and Structure team at ISTerre, which is a group of 55 scientists with 17 Faculty staff and 7 technicians/ engineers.
Since then, the research topics of the PI were centered on physics and geophysics, the link between the two being his expertise in wave propagation in complex media. In parallel to data analysis at the geophysics scale, Philippe ROUX strongly promotes a multi-scale approach with the use of an advanced laboratory set-up where he uses controlled experiments to reproduce the physics processes that drive our observations at the Earth scale. In particular, the PI is still profoundly involved with wave propagation in complex media, as can be seen from his last publications on the physics of metamaterials induced by the interaction between plate waves and a collection of sub-wavelength resonators. Again, he and his team envision exciting geophysics applications around the idea that a dense forest might behave as a natural metamaterial, which might lead to cloaking and seismic protection from potentially destructive Rayleigh waves. The list of publications of Philippe ROUX includes a total of 156 peer-reviewed papers for an h-index of 30.
Updated on 20 septembre 2016