Organizing committee

Philippe Bénard

Philippe Bénard is a project manager at the LafargeHolcim Innovation Center focusing on CO₂ reduction footprint of cements. He has nineteen years experience in research and development in the cement industry, including 6 years leading projects related to oil well cements development and technical assistance to operations. He holds a PhD in Physical-Chemistry from the University of Burgundy (Dijon–France).

Siavash Ghabezloo

Siavash Ghabezloo is a research scientist and professor at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, France. He received a PhD degree in Geomechanics from Ecole des Ponts ParisTech. He has also a civil engineering degree from Shiraz university and a Master of Science in Soil Mechanics and Foundations from Tarbiat-Modarres university in Iran. His research works are mainly based on poromechanics theory, in its broad sense, with a particular emphasis on the characterization of the behavior of geomaterials. During the past ten years he contributed mainly to characterization of thermo-hydro-mechanical behavior of cement paste for oil-well integrity assessment and claystone for nuclear waste disposal. Siavash Ghabezloo is the vice president and general secretary of the French Rock Mechanics Committee.

Matthieu Vandamme

Matthieu Vandamme is Professor of Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, were he performs research at Laboratoire Navier. He received his Ph.D. from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at MIT (Cambridge, MA) in 2008, for a study of the creep properties of cement-based materials by nanoindentation. He is also engineer from Ecole Polytechnique (France) and from Ecole des Ponts ParisTech (France), and received an M.Sc. in solid mechanics from École des Ponts ParisTech in 2002. He was awarded the 2016 ASCE EMI Leonardo da Vinci Award. He specializes in poromechanics (i.e., in the study of how in-pore physical processes impact the mechanical behavior of porous materials) applied to civil engineering materials (concrete, rocks, soils). He also studies the creep properties of those materials.