IAMG Distinguished Lecture by Philippe Renard
Monday, October 21, 2019, 12:00am
Philippe Renard is Associate Professor of Hydrogeology at the University of Neuchatel Switzerland where he leads the stochastic hydrogeology group. He graduated from the Nancy School of Geology in Nancy, France and obtained his PhD from École des Mines de Paris in 1996. He was water supply engineer in Kankan, Guinea from 1992 to 1993 and lecturer in hydrogeology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) from 1997 to 2001.
His research focuses on stochastic hydrogeology and aquifer characterization. This includes various aspects such as groundwater hydraulics in porous, fractured or karstic rocks and the development of fast upscaling techniques for hydraulic conductivity. In the field of geostatistics, he has mainly been involved during the last 10 years in the development of multiple-point statistics methods and their application to a wide range of problems from 3D geological modeling to the simulation of climate variables. Since Neuchâtel is located at the foot of the Jura mountain, a special emphasis was also devoted to the study and modeling of karstic systems. Philippe and his team developed novel pseudo genetic methods allowing to simulate cave network structures in a probabilistic manner. He has also led studies related to the analysis and modeling of seawater intrusion processes in coastal aquifers in Cyprus, Tunisia, and Yucatan. Philippe was editor of Hydrogeology Journal from 2005 to 2011, president of the geoENVia association promoting the application of geostatistics for environmental sciences from 2006 to 2010 and organizer of several conferences such as the geoENV and Eurokarst biannual events. He is the author of more than 115 scientific articles ( http://members.unine.ch/philippe.renard/biblio.html ) in international journals. He has been the initiator of the world-wide hydrogeological parameter data base http://wwhypda.org , an open source project aiming at facilitating the access of well referenced data allowing to construct ex-situ prior distributions. He initiated and manages the Hydrogeologist Time Capsule project https://timecapsule.iah.org devoted to interviewing leading hydrogeologists.