Frédéric Dias - Curriculum Vitae#

Research Leadership

From his appointment as Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA), Frédéric Dias has actively been involved in student supervision. He built the first Ocean Wave Energy research group at University College Dublin. This group now has an international reputation in wave energy and in extreme ocean waves. He has been the Secretary General of the International Union for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) from 2008 to 2016 and has served on a number of strategic international panels and commissions in fluid dynamics and waves, including the NATO panel for mathematics and physics. He serves as co-chief editor of the European Journal of Mechanics B/Fluids since 2000. Frédéric Dias has demonstrated strategic vision on future developments of science in his field. For example, in 1998, he organized in France the first international conference on three-dimensional aspects of air-sea interaction. This conference shed light on future research directions and almost twenty years later it is clear that this conference successfully shaped the recent research. In 2004, he published a 60 page paper on wave turbulence in Physics Reports. Far more than a review paper, this work contains important conjectures which have given a new impulse to applications of wave turbulence in various fields. In 2014, he published in Nature Photonics a review paper on instabilities, breathers and rogue waves in optics, which has already been cited more than 200 times in less than three years.

Education and teaching

Frédéric Dias has developed innovative approaches to the undergraduate teaching of mathematics and physics. At Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, he has taught for many years a course entitled “Crossed glances at mathematics and physics”. Initially only in the curriculum of the mathematics students, it also became part of the curriculum of the physics students given the success of the course. He has given numerous popular talks to diverse audiences eg: the public, high school students etc.

Summary of Academic Achievements

Frédéric Dias’s research has led to 180 refereed journal or book publications, 1 co-authored monograph, 20 conference presentations at plenary/keynote level. His papers are published in earth science, mathematics, physics, engineering journals such as Nature, International Journal of Climatology, Scientific Reports, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A, Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Physics Reports, Renewable Energy, Journal of Fluids and Structures, Physica D, Physics of Fluids.

Citation Data (March 2017)

Total Citations 6250; H-index = 41; i10-index = 119 (Google scholar). Citation analysis clearly indicates the significant and emerging influence of Frédéric Dias in his field eg: over 3700 citations since 2012.

Funding ID

Over the last six years Frédéric Dias’s activities have received extensive funding, from various international sources: Irish, French, Cypriot and Australian National Research Agencies, as well as from the European Union, totaling over 3 M€. In particular, in 2011, Frédéric Dias received a Principal Investigator Award from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). This was a 825 k€ five-year award entitled “High-end computational modelling for wave energy systems”, in partnership with Aquamarine Power Ltd., the company that have developed the Oyster device. This award allowed him to lead a team of 6 researchers in his SFI-funded wave energy grant. More recently Frédéric Dias was awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for a project entitled “Multidisciplinary Studies of Extreme Nonlinear and Rogue Wave Phenomena” (MULTIWAVE). MULTIWAVE is an interdisciplinary project at the frontiers of mathematics, physics and engineering which will explore important open questions in nonlinear wave propagation and turbulence and the emergence of extreme events. The project was undertaken in collaboration with Prof John Dudley, an expert in nonlinear optical physics, to allow a coordinated approach to the analytical, numerical and experimental studies of the nonlinear effects that form the subject of the project. In 2014, Frédéric was awarded an ERC Proof of Concept grant for a project entitled “Wave Measurement” and linked to the MULTIWAVE project. In 2015, Frédéric received another Award from SFI through the US-Ireland scheme to understand nearshore extreme wave events through studies of coastal boulder transport.