Roland Pellenq is Director of Research at CNRS, the French Government Agency for Scientific Research in the European Institute of Membranes (IEM, Montpellier, France). Roland Pellenq is a computational materials scientist with a strong interest in the physics and mechanics of micro- and nanoporous materials and confined fluids. After a Master in Plasma Physics from Aix-Marseille University (France), He obtained a PhD in Chemical Physics from Imperial College London (UK) in 1994 and received his Habilitation degree in Physics from the University of Orléans (France) in 2000. Roland Pellenq’s research is dedicated to the development of bottom-up simulation approaches (starting at an atomistic level of description) for a large variety of critical problems in energy and environment, ranging from hydrogen and CH4 storage, CO2 sequestration, shale gas to fundamentals of cement and concrete research and more recently on Urban Physics. R. Pellenq is the author or co-author of 250+ papers published in major peer reviewed scientific journals. He was the founder and head of the MIT-CNRS joint laboratory « Multi-Scale Material Science for Energy and Environment » located at MIT. (2012-2020). He currently leads for CNRS an international research effort on Urban Physics linking city texture as seen through the prism of Statistical Physics and applied to environmental, public health and climate challenges named USERS (Urban Science and Engineering for Resilience and Sustainablity). He joined IEM in July 2023 and where he leads the FAST (Fundamentals to Applications using Simulation and Theory) group.
R. Pellenq received a number of research awards that include the Prix Special du Jury, Trophées de l’Innovation from Aix-Marseille University in 2019 ; the Research Medal of the European Geomechanics association ALERT in 2018 ; The Appreciation award of the Engineering Mechanical Institute (EMI) of the US for his outstanding service to the community in the US and outside and dedication in 2017 ; the Young Researcher Award at the French Festival des Sciences et des Technologies in 2003 and the Young Researcher Award of the Division de Physique-Chimie of the Société Française de Physique in 2002.
