Peter RyserDr. Peter Ryser is a Professor Emeritus at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He has over three decades of research and teaching experience from various corporate and academic institutions. He was previously a Director at Siemens Building Technologies where he was responsible for R&D, product innovation and patents. Dr. Ryser has a Ph.D. in applied Physics from the University of Geneva, a Masters degree in Experimental Physics and an MBA.
Johan Alexandre Philippe GaumeI started my scientific career in 2008 at the Grenoble University in the IRSTEA laboratory where I did my master's thesis on the rheology of dense granular materials using the discrete element method. In the same lab, I followed with a PhD on the numerical modeling of the release depth of extreme avalanches using a combined mechanical-statistical approach and spatial extreme statistics. In 2013 I obtained a postdoc position at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Davos where I was in charge of developing and applying numerical models to improve the evaluation of avalanche release conditions and thus avalanche forecasting. While my PhD was mostly theoretical and numerical, my postdoc in Davos allowed me to gain a practical expertise by participating in laboratory and field experiments which helped to validate the models I develop. In 2016, I was awarded a SNF grant to work as a research and teaching associate in CRYOS at EPFL on the multiscale modeling of snow and avalanche processes. I developed discrete approaches to model snow micro-structure deformation and failure in order to evaluate constitutive snow models to be used at a larger scale in continuum models. I also developed numerical models for wind-driven snow transport. In 2017, I was a Visiting Scholar at UCLA to work on a Material Point Method (MPM) to simulate both the initiation and propagation of snow avalanches in a unified manner. The UCLA MPM model was initially developed for the Disney movie "Frozen" and has been modified and enriched based on Critical State Soil Mechanics to model the release and flow of slab avalanches. The results of this collaboration have been published in Nature Communications. In 2018, I was awarded the SNF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship and became professor at EPFL and head of SLAB, the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory. At SLAB, we study micro-mechanical failure and fracture propagation of porous brittle solids, with applications in snow slab avalanche release. We also simulate avalanche dynamics and flow regime transitions over complex 3D terrain through the development of new models (depth-resolved and depth-averaged) based on MPM.In 2020, I obtained a SPARK grant to develop a new approach to simulate and better understand complex process chains in gravitational mass movements, including permafrost instabilities, rock, snow and ice avalanches and transitions to debris flows.
Thomas MountfordD'origine britannique, né en 1961. Il a reçu la bourse présidentielle des jeunes investisseurs (Presidential Young Investigator Grant) en 1990 et le prix de la Fraternité Sloan (Sloan Fellowship) en 1991. Son travail montre que les valeurs critiques d'une classe large de de systèmes de particules proches sont égales à 1, et que, suite à plusieurs travaux sur la trajectoire du mouvement brownien, incluant une simulation numérique, le nombre d'îlots browniens en 2 dimensions tend vers l'infini quand leurs tailles tendent vers 0. Il reçoit le prix Rosenbaum en 1993 lui ouvrant ainsi les portes du Isaac Newton Institute à Cambridge. Il est également décoré par le prix Rollo Davidson en 1995 et nommé membre honoraire de l'Institute of Mathematical Statistics en 2001.
Assistant Profeseur de Mathematique a UCLA 1987- 1991
Associate Professeur de Mathematique a UCLA 1991-1993
Professeur de Mathematique a UCLA 1993-2001
Professeur Departement de mathématiques, EPFL dès 2001
