Prof. Pierre Berest
Pierre Bérest graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and from the School of Mines of Paris (Ecole des Mines de Paris). He was Head of the Solid Mechanics Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique (1990-2000) and currently is research director for the same laboratory. He teaches Rock Mechanics at the Paris VI University and in Ecole Centrale de Paris. P. Bérest chairs the French Standing Committee for Nuclear Waste Management appointed by the French Nuclear Safety Authority and is a member of the National Assessment Committee for Nuclear Waste Management appointed by the French Parliament. He is a member of the Scientific Council, French Petroleum Institute (IFP) and was the 2011 President of the Solution Mining Research Institute (SMRI). He is a member of the French Commission for Underground Storage Safety (CSSS) and, is on the Editorial Board of Oil & Gas Science and Technology Journal.
Professor Bérest is author of two books and more than 100 publications in the fields of plasticity, viscoplasticity, thermomechanics, calculus of variations, buckling, and residual stresses. He has contributed to several research projects related to underground caverns, tightness tests in salt caverns, caverns stability and abandonment, and salt mines. In 1999, he was awarded the Gaz de France Great Prize by the French Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Benoît Brouard
Benoît Brouard holds a Master of Science from Arts et Métiers (ENSAM), France; he also holds a MD from Ecole Centrale, and a Ph.D. in Rock Mechanics from Ecole Polytechnique, France.
Dr. Brouard has more than 25 years’ experience in rock mechanics, with particular expertise in salt caverns, rock salt, solution mining, permeability tests and analysis of earthquake effects on underground structures. He is co-author of more than 100 journal and technical papers mainly dedicated to the behavior of solution-mined caverns.
Benoit Brouard served as President of the Solution Mining Research Institute (SMRI) for 2015.
Prof. Attilio Frangi
Prof. Frangi is Professor at the Department of Structural Engineering, Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Professor at the Département de Mécanique, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (France).
He was awarded the Fondazione Confalonieri prize (1999), the Young Researcher Fellowship Award, MIT, Cambridge (2001) and the “Bruno Finzi” prize for Rational Mechanics, Istituto Lombardo di Scienza e Lettere (2009).
Prof. Frangi has developed an extensive teaching activity both at the Politecnico di Milano, since 1998, and at the Ecole Polytechnique, from 2001 to 2014. He has had the responsibility for over 30 complete courses of solid/structural mechanics and of numerical methods in solid mechanics. He is member of the Committee of the Doctoral School at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, since 2010. From 2013 to 2015 he has been member of the Council (Giunta) of the School of Building Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano.
Professor Frangi developed the computation core of LOCAS software for Brouard Consulting.
Dr. Vаssilу Zаkhаrоv
Vаssilу Zаkhаrоv graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Physical Department; holds a Ph.D in Mathematical modelling, Numerical methods and Computational software development in Physics and Mathematics from Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences.
Dr Zаkhаrоv is a laureate of “Kurchatov” prize (2006). His area of interests covers a wide range of research domains from plasma physics, simulation of atomic processes and physics of fluids to development of statistical models, numerical methods and computational codes. Vаssilу Zаkhаrоv is an author of over a hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.