José-Eduardo Wesfreid

After studying physics in Buenos Aires, Argentina, José-Eduardo flew off to Saclay, France where he did his PhD on the Rayleigh-Bénard convection, a hydrodynamic instability well known to meteorologists. He then joined the Laboratory Physics and Mechanics of Heterogeneous Media at ESPCI Paris. Today Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS, José-Eduardo has worked throughout his career on instabilities in fluid mechanics, chaos and turbulence.

His work, mainly experimental, focuses on the destabilization of fluids when passing around an obstacle. He has notably developed optical methods for visualization and measurement in fluid mechanics. He has also worked as a scientific consultant for Schlumberger and met Sophie Goujon-Durand on this occasion. Together, they were working on the design of a flowmeter; a subject for fundamental research was born out of an industrial interest.

José-Eduardo has developed a genuine interest in the history of science and the role of visualization in fluid mechanics. Hydrodynamics is a "science on a human scale", he likes "the expressive richness of the image".

He is also very attached to scientific popularization. He has been the scientific secretary of a series of exhibitions on Chaos that took place in Barcelona or in the Palais de la Découverte in Paris. José-Eduardo also evokes the "temptation of pure aesthetics" in his experiments: "Although my experiments are naturally designed on the basis of scientific relevance, I am always amazed by the beauty of flows in fluid mechanics."