Materials Science, Data Science and Cultural Heritage

Professor Robert Erdmann's career

Prior to his dissertation, Robert Erdmann founded a scientific and engineering software company and worked at Sandia National Laboratories on various solidification and transport processes. After receiving his PhD from the University of Arizona in 2006, he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Applied Mathematics Program there, where he worked on multiscale modelling of materials science processes, image processing for cultural heritage, molecular dynamics, and the development of infrared glasses.
In 2014, he moved to Amsterdam to focus full-time on combining materials science, computer science and imaging science on topics related to access, preservation and understanding of cultural heritage.
He is a senior researcher at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and a full professor at two faculties of the University of Amsterdam: sciences (physics) and humanities (conservation and restoration of cultural heritage).

Visit to ENS Paris-Saclay

On 7 December 2022, Rob Erdmann lectured to students at ENS Paris-Saclay as part of the "Ancient and Heritage Materials" cross-disciplinary module (responsible: Loïc Bertrand) and presented the first results of a scientific collaboration on the chemistry of the colouring materials used by the painters Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky to create some of their major works. This collaboration is part of Victor Gonzalez's Marie Skłodowska-Curie post-doctoral fellowship at PPSM , co-funded by the Île-de-France Region.

On 8 December 2022, he gave a seminar on the joint integration, by artificial intelligence methods, of textual descriptions and elemental composition data by X-ray fluorescence for the study of paintings at the microscopic scale, a seminar jointly organised by the PPSM laboratories and the Borelli Centre.

Finally, on 9 December, he participated in exchanges with the Musée national d'art moderne and the Kandinsky library at the Centre Pompidou. Finally, he had ample opportunity to exchange with the scientists and students of the new "Ancient and Paleo-Inspired Materials" theme of the PPSM chemistry laboratory of the ENS and the CNRS, notably concerning the processing of images collected for the development of restoration processes that are more respectful of health and the environment (developed in particular within the framework of the GoGreen project of the European Commission, of which the PPSM and the LMPS are partners at the ENS).