Vladislav A. Yastrebov

I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at Centre des Matériaux at MINES ParisTech. I'm specialized in computational and applied mechanics and actually work on several topics: coupling between the Discrete Dislocation Dynamics and the Finite Element Method; methods in computational contact mechanics; phase-transformations in shape memory alloys; mechanics of contact between rough surfaces; initiation of dynamic sliding and others.

At my personal page you can find a detailed description of my research projects, my curriculum vitae and the list of publications with preprints available. As I'm passionate about both science and art/photography, here you can find some graphics and photos, some of them are half-scientific some are simply photos of nature: there are stars, planets, liquids and streams, clouds, paysages, micro and macro world. In my blog I put some interesting and/or useful information and my personal opinion on some scienitific and nonscientific topics. You can also find here some links and short descriptions of the software I use, web-pages of people and groups whose work I appreciate and many other things such as scientific resources, lectures, courses, journals, associations, etc. Below I put my autobiographical sketch.

I completed my graduate school in Saint-Petersburg Lyceum 239 (1999-2001), one of the strongest high schools in Russia specialized in mathematics and physics. It is alma-mater for many distinguished people: mathematicians Yuri Matiyasevich, Grigori Perelman (Fields medal 2006), Stanislav Smirnov (Fields medal 2010), FIDE world chess champion Alexander Khalifman (1999) and many others. The Lyceum preserves Kolmogorov's traditions and besides extensive courses of physics and mathematics it avocates hiking trips in mountains such as Ural, Khibiny, Altai, Alatau, etc.

I obtained my Bachelor and Master of science from Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University, department of Physics and Mechanics, chair of Applied Mechanics and Control Processes lead by Prof. Vladimir Alexandrovich Palmov. I was lucky to be teached by such bright minds as Pavel Andreevich Zhilin, Victor Nilovych Naumov, Victor Alexeevich Pupirev and many others.

During my second year, thanks to Irina Yurievna Pusheva (the unchallenged coach of the Polytechnical team), in 2003 I took the first place at the St Petersburg Olympiad in Strength of Materials and proceeded to the International stage of competition, where I didn't perform so well. After this small success I was invited by Prof. Boris Evgenievich Melnikov to participate in some projects of the chair of Strength of Materials. There, under supervision of ass. Prof. Artem Semenovich Semenov, I worked on continuum coupled damage models for quasi-brittle materials and on their implementation in finite element software PANTOCRATOR. With Prof. Melnikov and Semenov I defended my bachelor and master theses in 2005 and 2007, respectively, both with distinction. During my graduate study with group of school friends we hiked a lot all around Russia, I did some climbing and mountaineering.

During my 5th year I started to work as a junior research fellow at St Petersburg Corning research center a part of Corning Inc. Research and Development group. I was charged to optimize some glass manufacturing processes. My work included some analytical and finite element analyses of visco-elastic material under complex thermo-mechanical loading as well as development of computational tools for internal needs.

I proceeded with my study at Ecole des Mines de Paris in France, where under the supervision of Georges Cailletaud and Frédéric Feyel (Onera) I worked on several aspects of computational contact mechanics, supervized one PhD student and learned French and enjoyed life in Paris with my wife and son who was born in 2010. I sucessfully defended my PhD thesis in March 2011 in front of jury consistent of Peter Wriggers, Pierre Alart, Daniel Nélias, Jean-François Molinari, Boris E. Melnikov and François Comte.

Since February 2011 I was postdoctoral fellow at Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. There I supervised David S. Kammer (PhD candidate) with whom we have been working on the problems of sliding initiation at frictional interfaces. Another local project is an indeep analysis of contact between rough surfaces, which we conducted with PhD Guillaume Anciaux. Also we collaborated with PhD Alejandro Aragon on the optimization of the contact detection.

On April 2012 I got back to the Centre des Matériaux, the laboratory where I did my PhD. Currently I'm working on the coupling of two codes: Numodis (Discrete Dislocation Dynamics) and Zset (Finite Element Method) to study initiation of fatigue cracks in a steel alloy (ANR project AFGRAP).