Seismology to Engineering: Earth’s Core to Design

Benjamin Richard is Head of the Structural Performance Analysis and Modeling Lab at the Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute (IRSN). He was a research engineer working at the French Sustainable Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) since October 2011 up to July 2018. He is interested in the numerical prediction of the seismic behavior of reinforced concrete structures dedicated to either civil engineering or nuclear engineering. Within the framework of research projects joining French or European major institutions working in the field of nuclear engineering, Benjamin Richard is in charge of developing efficient numerical strategies to assess the safety of complex structures regarding the seismic risk. In particular, he is interested in predicting specific nonlinear responses, such as cracking, that are of primary importance for design or safety studies. Benjamin Richard promotes the use of probabilistic approaches in risk assessment and vulnerability studies. Benjamin Richard is also a lecturer at Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris Saclay. He teaches the course entitled "seismic design of reinforced concrete and steel structures" to graduate students. In 2018, Benjamin Richard was author or coauthor of more than 31 papers published in international journals and more than 34 papers presented in international conference proceedings. Benjamin Richard is Head of the Technical and Scientific Committee of the French Association for Earthquake Engineering (AFPS) since 2019.

Cédric Giry is associate professor at the Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, in the Civil Engineering Departement. He develops his research activities at LMT (Laboratoire de Mécanique et Technologie) on the analysis of civil engineering structures subjected to static and severe loadings (earthquake). He develops also dedicated tools for the modeling of cracking in reinforced concrete structures and old masonry. He is in charge at LMT of the Thematical Research Unit “Dynamic and behavior of civil engineering structures”.

Jean-Francois Semblat is Professor at ENSTA-Paris near Paris. His main fields of interest are wave propagation (in mechanics and seismology), dynamic soil-structure interaction, earthquake eng. and numerical modelling (FEM, BEM). He teaches seismology, soil dynamics, structural dynamics and numerical methods at ENSTA-Paris, Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Ponts-ParisTech and University of Pavia.