Yves Bréchet


Yves Bréchet is a physicist, specialist of materials science, currently Scientific director of Saint Gobain compagny, and professor at Monash and McMaster university, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Biography

Yves Bréchet graduated from École Polytechnique, École des hautes études en sciences sociales and obtained his doctoral degree and habilitation from Joseph Fourier University in 1987 and 1992, respectively.
He has been a full professor at Grenoble INP/Phelma between 1987 and 2012, an adjunct professor of materials science and engineering at McMaster University, a senior Research Professor at the Institut Universitaire de France, and a member of the SIMaP Laboratory with the University of Grenoble.
On November 30, 2010, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences.
He has been a member of the international scientific council of ArcelorMittal and the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, and a scientific advisor to Rio Tinto Alcan, EDF and ONERA, as well as several editing boards of scientific journals
On September 19, 2012, he is named to the position of High Commissioner for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies by the Council of Ministers of the French Republic, succeeding Catherine Cesarsky.
He resigned from this position in 2018, and is now Scientific director of Saint Gobain compagny, while keeping a position as Reseach professor in Monash university, adjunct professor in McMaster university and advisory professor in Jiaotong university. Since 2018 he is giving a course on "scieitic analysis for political decisions" in Econe Natioanle d'Administration
He is also president of the Scientfic council of Framatome, and president of the scientific coucil of the fontation "Maisons pour les sciences"

Activities

His activities span the fields of physical metallurgy, thermodynamics, microstructures, phase transformations, plasticity, fracture micromechanics, material selection, structural materials design, biointerfaces, structural biomimetics. He has written more than 600 papers and co-authored 6 books and supervised more than 80 PhD
He has been a member of the international scientific council of ArcelorMittal and the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, and a scientific advisor to Rio Tinto Alcan, EDF and ONERA.

Honors and awards

- Member of the Academia Europea
- Wolf-Ramanujan lecture
- Docteur Honoris Causa de l'Université de McMaster
- Professor at College de France, annual chair “Innovation and Technology”
- Grande medaille de la Société Française de Métallurgie et Materiaux
- Cambridge Granta award for excellence in teaching in materials science
- Jiaotong University “Master Distinguished lecture”
- Kelly lecture "Armours and Brasiers"
- Docteur Honoris Causa de l'Université Catholique de Louvain