Prof. Fabrice Pierron

Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences

School of Mechanical Engineering
University of Southampton

Professor Fabrice Pierron has been a Professor of Solid Mechanics at the University of Southampton (UoS) since June 2012, having spent the first part of his career in France. His research specialization concerns the development of novel identification strategies based on full-field deformation measurements and data-rich inverse identification. He has been instrumental in the development of the Virtual Fields Method (VFM), which has now gained widespread international recognition and is commercialised as part of a dedicated software platform marketed by the MatchID company (www.matchid.eu), of which he is a founding member. He has published over 140 international journal articles and co-authored the only existing book on the VFM. He was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in May 2012 as part of his relocation to the UoS, and has been Editor-in-Chief of Strain (Wiley) between 2010 and 2020. In 2014, he was granted a £1.2M EPSRC Established Career Fellowship that extended his main research interest to high strain rate testing using high-speed imaging (www.photodyn.org). This effort has also been supported by a stream of US Air Force EOARD grants totalling 700k+ USD since 2013. He is part of a group of researchers who have recently been awarded a £6.1M EPSRC programme grant. His role in this project is using ultra-high speed imaging and novel ultrasonics deformation procedures to elucidate mechano-transduction processes at the scale of cells and tissues when submitted to ultrasonic deformation (20 Hz to 1 MHz).