Philippe Coussot
Laboratoire Navier (Ecole des Ponts-CNRS-IFSTTAR)
Engineer
Fellow, Elected 2018
Phillipe Coussot received his engineering degrees in 1987 and 1989 from Ecole Polytechnique and ENGRED-ParisTech respectively. For his thesis research he worked with J.M. Piau and obtained
a Ph.D. in Fluid Mechanics in 1992 from Grenoble University. He received his Ph.D. Adviser Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in 1998. Until 2002 he
served as the project manager for the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at the Laboratoire Central des Ponts et Chaussées. He then served as the Director of the Laboratory for Materials and
Structures for Civil Engineering (CNRS-French Ministry of Ecology) until 2009. Until 2015 he was the Director of the Laboratory of Excellence for Multiscale Modelling and Experiment for
Sustainable Construction. Presently, he is the Director of Education and Research Chair at Saint-Gobain-Ecole des Ponts ParisTech as well as the Head of the Research Team on Physics of Porous
Media at the Laboratoire Navier Ecoles des Ponts-CNRS-IFSTTAR.
Dr. Coussot’s work spans a wide variety of pastes and yield stress materials from chocolate to Carbopol. His early work focused on rheology in civil engineering applications including mud flows
and the rheology of curing concrete. Currently he is working on the nonlinear rheology of concentrated suspensions which exhibit particularly complex non-Newtonian behavior due to the many-body
interactions between the particles and the rheology of the surrounding liquid. Yield stress fluid flows is another topic of long standing interested. His pioneering studies in applying NMR
velocimetry to measure the local distribution of velocity profiles in dense paste-like materials under shear helped develop a deeper understanding of the key role of slip in multiphase systems
and avalanche-like dynamics during creep of yield stress materials. He has written six books in French and English about the physics of pastes, suspensions, muds, and granular materials. He is
a regular consultant for a number of consumer product companies including Colgate and Procter & Gamble.
He has received awards from the French Society of Hydraulics, the International Association of Hydraulics, and the French Society of Rheology, as well as many other awards including the Silver
Medal of the CNRS in 2015 and the Weissenberg Award of the European Society of Rheology in 2018. He is the founder and first editor-in-chief of Rheologie and also serves on the editorial
boards of Applied Rheology, Rheologic Acta, and Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. In 2017 he guest-edited (with A. Ya Malkin and G. Ovarlez, the highly-cited
special issue of Rheologica Acta celebrating 100 years since Bingham’s pioneering article on yield stress materials.