Stéphane Avril is a distinguished Full Professor at Institut Mines Telecom affiliated at Mines Saint-Etienne in France. He runs a group of 20+ in soft tissue biomechanics, with a special focus on constitutive modeling and identification using imaging techniques. He was the director of the CIS center for biomedical and healthcare engineering (70+ people) between 2010 and 2020 and has been the deputy director of SAINBIOSE (INSERM endorsed laboratory with 100+ researchers) since 2016. Stéphane received his PhD in mechanical and civil engineering in 2002 at Mines Saint-Etienne (France). After positions at Arts et Métiers ParisTech (France) and Loughborough University (UK) where he developed the Virtual Fields Methods, Stéphane returned to his alma mater in 2008 and extended his broad experience of inverse problems to soft tissue biomechanics, especially regarding aortic aneurisms in close collaboration with vascular surgeons. Stéphane was a visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor (USA) in 2008 and has been a visiting professor at Yale University between 2014 and 2019. Since September 2020, Stéphane is a guest professor at TU Vienna in Austria.
Stéphane has received many awards and distinctions including ICCB best communication award (2017), Editor’s Choice Paper Finalist – ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering (2016), ESB best poster award (2015), BSSM 50th Anniversary Plenary Speaker (2014). He has led two national ANR grants in soft tissue biomechanics and supervised 25+ PhD students. In 2015, Stéphane was awarded an ERC (European Research Council) consolidator grant of 2m€ for the Biolochanics project on: Localization in biomechanics and mechanobiology of aneurysms: Towards personalized medicine.
Most of Stéphane’s research is aimed at improving the treatment of cardiovascular diseases by assisting physicians and surgeons with biomechanical numerical simulations.
In 2017, Stéphane co-founded Predisurge, a spin-off company of IMT at Mines Saint-Etienne. PrediSurge offers innovative software solutions for patient-specific numerical simulation of surgical procedures. First applications in endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) enable the automatic design of fully-customized fenestrated stent-grafts. Preliminary evaluations reveal huge benefits for the 20000+ patients requiring fenestrated EVAR every year: faster procedures, increased precision, near-zero risk of complications. Our vision for 2025 is that all EVAR procedures will have to be numerically simulated for ensuring the highest degree of safety.
