Bernhard Schrefler
Invited by the Laboratory of mechanics and technology (LMT-Cachan)

Bernhard Schrefler is Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Padua. With Professor Zienkiewicz he contributed to the development of computational strategies in porous media mechanics. He was the first to apply Biot's theory to surface subsidence due to withdrawal of water and gas, and to introduce the generalized Bishop's stress, today the most used stress tensor in par tially saturated soils mechanics. He has developed this theory up to large application: seismic behaviour of earth dams, effect of tunnel fires on concrete, leaching in nuclear waste disposals and alkali aggregate reactions in dams.
In the field of technology for thermonuclear controlled fusion he contributed to the design of the reversed field pinch fusion device RFX in Padua and to the analysis of superconducting coils for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Fusion Reactor).
Professor Schrefler is member of the Italian Academy of Sciences (dei XL), received honorary doctorates from the St. Petersburg StateTechnical University, the University of Technology of Lodz, the Leibniz University of Hannover, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded the Maurice A. Biot Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), received the Computational Mechanics Award and the IACM Award of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM).


Jean-François Thisse
Invited by the Economics and Management Department

Jacques-FrançoisThisse, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, of the Regional Science Association International and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, is professor of economics and regional science at the Université catholique de Louvain Belgium) and a member of CORE. His main fields of interest are in location theory, economic geography, industrial organization, and public economics. He has published more than 150 papers in various scientific journals, including American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, International Economic Review, Mathematics of Operations Research, Geographical Analysis and Journal of Urban Economics. He has held a full professorship at the Sorbonne (France) and has been visiting professor at University of Pennsylvania andVirginia Polytechnic Institute (USA) as well as Kyoto University.He is the co-author of Discrete ChoiceTheory of Product Differentiation (The MIT Press), Economics of Agglomeration (Cambridge University Press) and Economic Geography Princeton University Press). Jacques-FrançoisThisse is also the recipient of the 2004William Alonso Memorial Prize, the Prix scientifique quinquennal Ernest-John Solvay (Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, Brussels, 2005) and the 2007 European Prize in Regional Science.


Jayadev Misra
Invited by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Department

Jayadev Misra is a professor and holder of the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his work in the area of concurrent programming,with emphasis on rigorous methods to improve the programming process.His work on the UNITY methodology, jointly with Chandy, has been influential in both academia and industry, and has spawned a large number of tools and research projects. He has recently developed a programming language, calle d "Orc", for concurrent orchestrations of interacting components. He is also spear-heading an effort, jointly with Tony Hoare, to automate large-scale program verification.
Misra is a fellow of ACM and IEEE; he held the Guggenheim fellowship during 1988-1989. He was the Strachey lecturer at Oxford University in 1996, and has held the Belgian FNRS International Chair of Computer Science in 1990. He is a member of the Academy of DistinguishedTeachers at the University ofTexas at Austin. Misra has been the past editor of several journals including: Computing Surveys, Journal of the ACM, Information Processing Letters and the Formal Aspects of Computing. He is the author of two books, "Parallel Program Design:A Foundation", Addison-Wesley, 1988, co-authored with Mani Chandy, and "A Discipline of Multiprogramming", Springer-Verlag, 2001.


Ronald Coifman
Invited by the Center for Mathematical Studies and their Applications (CMLA)

Ronald Coifman is professor of mathematics and computer science in Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. His contribution with Yves Meyer from CMLA and others mathematicians concerns harmonic analysis, real and complex analysis, wavelets or integral operators theory.His work on Hardy spaces,Calderon conjectures,Zygmund singular integral operators or wavelet packets is still a source of inspiration for many of the most talented analysts and led to other spectacular discoveries like Kato's conjecture. But he also provides computational methods and algorithms in signal and image processing (sparse representation, denoising, restoration, compression, data storage...). For instance his discovery of wavelet packets gives an efficient solution to the problem of unfolding a signal in the time-frequency plane with numerous applications.
Professor Ronald Coifman is sharing an uncommon scientific vision and a natural leadership together with an extremely pragmatic attitude in applied problems. His contribution is widely recognized : he won the most prestigious awards. He is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and of the National Academy of Sciences, he obtained the DARPA Sustained Excellence Award in 1996, the Pionner Award from ICIAM and he received the National Medal of Science from President Clinton in 1999.