CEE Spotlight

A new collaborative research venture between CEE and two top French universities is about to take off, thanks to the hard work of Professor Chloé Arson and Associate Chair Dr. Glenn J. Rix.

Beginning in the summer of 2013, as many as five graduate-level students from Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech (ENPC) and Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering will participate in an exchange program that will match them with specially focused research internships on the other’s campus.

An additional opportunity is also being developed between CEE and Ecole Centrale de Lille.

“This is just the beginning,” said Rix, who traveled to Paris in October to sign memorandums of understanding with officials from both schools.

“From here, we plan to launch additional collaborations between graduate-level researchers and faculty on both continents, establishing a truly international focus for engineering students who will one day be tackling global engineering challenges.”

According to Arson, the program has gotten off to a healthy start, but there is plenty of room for growth.

“We were really encouraged by the response we got from the CEE faculty when we asked them to develop research opportunities for this program,” said Arson, who earned her doctorate at the ENPC in 2009.

“Our faculty developed 11 research proposals, three of which we anticipate filling this summer. Our colleagues at Ecole des Ponts offered two research internships for CEE doctoral students.”

The French Exchange Program has yet to officially launch, but Arson got a little bit of a head start this past fall when she hosted Solenn Le Pense, an ENPC doctoral student, at CEE. For two months, the two researchers collaborated on a model of damage and plasticity in unsaturated porous rock. As a result of their work, Le Pense implemented a model in a finite element program that was co-developed by Arson and other colleagues.

LePense and Arson are now preparing a paper for the upcoming Biot Conference on Poro-Mechanics, to be held in Vienna, Austria in July 2013.

“We expect to collaborate on other projects and publications in the future,” said Arson. “And with the new exchange program, we expect to repeat this type of collaboration many times in the future.”

Georgia Tech graduate students who are interested in participating in the French Exchange Program should consult with their academic advisor and then contact Dr. Arson at 404.385.0143 or chloe.arson@ce.gatech.edu.