Jean Biarez: His Life and Work - Multiscale Geomechanics: From Soil to Engineering Projects - page 8

By the mid-1980s, the laboratory consisted of around 100 academic members
including teachers, researchers, doctoral and other graduate students. Since 1958,
593 PhD theses have been produced, some of them in Grenoble and, from 1976
onwards, at Ecole Centrale alone or jointly with other universities and engineering
schools through a commonly accredited DEA. More than 20 professors now
teaching at universities or prestigious engineering schools obtained their PhD from
this laboratory, out of which 12 are also alumni of Ecole Centrale .
1.3. The major research interests of Jean Biarez
We have already mentioned the fact that Biarez, alongside Paul Anglès d'Auriac,
introduced continuum mechanics into the teaching program of soil mechanics,
which led the first theses to be written on elasticity and plasticity theories. Then,
with Klaus Wiendieck and in his own thesis, he introduced granular medium
mechanics, which was later investigated by Bernard Cambou, Roland Gourves and
Pierre Evesque. The latter, a trained physicist who joined the laboratory in 1991,
arranged a meeting between Biarez and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. Invited by the
Nobel Prize laureate to give a seminar as part of his course at the prestigious Collège
de France , Biarez expounded the concept of contractive-dilative behavior of
granular materials to physicists.
Through his work with Professor Bishop of Imperial College, London, Biarez
realized the importance of laboratory and scale model tests for investigating soil
rheology, an approach that was later adopted by Jack Lanier, Etienne Flavigny and
Pierre-Yves Hicher. This work led to formalization of the constitutive models we
have already mentioned: Félix Darve's octahedral law and the “Hujeux” law, now
called the ECP law. We can also mention the recent developments made by Arezou
Modaressi and Fernando Lopez-Caballero.
From early on, Biarez was interested in the pressiometer, along with Louis
Ménard (a classmate from preparatory school) and Michel Gambin. The problems of
foundation, in particular the behavior of piles, opened a significant research area that
was developed by Pierre Foray. We should also mention the work on elasticity by
his colleagues at Grenoble − Jean-Pierre Giroud and Adel Saada − who went on to
have brilliant careers in the United States.
In cooperation with EDF, Biarez played a leading role in cyclic and dynamic
testing, where he aimed at characterizing soil under seismic loading. The first tests
in France on sand liquefaction were made during the PhD work of Franco Vilela.
The first cyclic tests on clay and marl were carried out by El Hosri and Hicher. A
major achievement was the characterization of the small strain properties of soils
using local strain measurements. El Hosri was the first in the world to use non-