Role and composition
The director of the institute, the three deputy directors as well as the project manager constitute the office of the institute.
They participate in the Institute Council in an advisory capacity and in the Scientific Council of the Institute. The Bureau is responsible for the executive management of the Institute and meets as often as necessary.
Nicolas Vandenberghe (Director of the Institute)
Nicolas Vandenberghe studied at the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan before obtaining a PhD in Physics at the University of Nice in 2002. After an internship at the Courant Institute of New York University, he was recruited as a lecturer at the IRPHE in 2005. He was deputy director of the Department of Mechanics (2014-2016). Since 2016 he has been a professor in the Thermal Engineering and Energy Department of the IUT of Aix-Marseille. He has been director of the Fabri de Peiresc research federation since 2018. His research activities concern the dynamics of deformable media. He has conducted studies on fluid-structure interactions in relation to animal locomotion. He is currently working on solid fragmentation. This research focuses on the fundamental mechanisms of selection of fragment size distribution. N. Vandenberghe is also director of studies of the DUT Génie Thermique et Energie en alternance.
Fabien Candelier (Deputy Director Training)
Fabien Candelier defended his thesis in fluid mechanics in 2005, at the Institut National Polytechnique de Nancy. He was first Assistant Master at the École des Mines de Nantes, for three years before joining the University of Aix-Marseille as a Senior Lecturer in 2010, where he was in charge of the first year of the Master in Mechanics from 2015 to 2020. His research focuses mainly on the modeling of the transport of spherical or anisotropic particles evolving in an imposed flow, and on the modeling of the dynamics of slender bodies whose applications are part of bio-inspired robotics.
Bruno Cochelin (Deputy Director Research)
After training in Mechanics at the École Normale Supérieure in Cachan, Bruno Cochelin defended his thesis in 1989 at the University of Lorraine, then joined the CNRS as a research fellow for 5 years. He was awarded the CNRS bronze medal in 1994. He returned to teaching in 1995 as a University Professor in Marseille, and developed a research activity at the LMA around numerical methods for the simulation of the vibratory dynamics of non-linear structures. For more than 10 years, he has been coordinating all mechanical engineering courses at the École Centrale de Marseille, where he was Director of Research from 2016 to 2019.
Pierre Boivin (Deputy Director Socio-Economic Relationships)
Pierre Boivin obtained an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France), and from KTH (Stockholm, Sweden), where he specialised in aeronautical/aerospace engineering. He then went on studying hydrogen combustion, and obtained his PhD cum laude in 2011, at Carlos III University (Madrid, Spain). He then worked for two years as a R&D engineer for Safran (Vernon, France), specialised on H2/O2 rocket engine ignition. He has been a CNRS research fellow since 2016 at the M2P2 lab. His research focuses on the study and modelling of compressible and reactive flows.
Romain Teychené (Project Manager)
After studying Applied Economics at Aix-Marseille University, Romain Teychené has been working for several years in the field of research and European funds. He started at OSEO/BPI France with the implementation and monitoring of programmes receiving ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), then in Switzerland at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) on projects benefiting from European grants within the framework of FP7. Wishing to come back to the region and to Marseille, he worked from 2015 until the end of 2019 as a design engineer at the CNRS as project manager in the IUSTI and I2M laboratories in charge of two European contracts within the framework of H2020 (the ERC PlantMove and the ERC IChaos). Since January 2020, he joined the staff of AMU and the Institute of Mechanics and Engineering.
