Biography

Professor at the Institut de Minéralogie, Physique des Matériaux et Cosmochimie at Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University, member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Georges Calas is a specialist in minerals and glass, and in structure-property relationships in materials. He is well aware of the strong public demand for original analyses on the subject of mineral and energy resources, whose rapid development is raising many questions.

A former student at the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud - Lyon, Georges Calas holds a degree in natural sciences and a doctorate in mineralogy. He was a researcher at the CNRS, a technical aid worker in Mexico and, in 1981, was appointed professor at the Université Paris Diderot-Paris VII, where he headed the UFR de sciences physiques de la Terre. He was deputy director of the Laboratoire de Minéralogie-Cristallographie de Paris / Institut de Minéralogie et physique des milieux condensés. A visiting scholar at Oxford and Edinburgh, he was Allan V. Cox Visiting Professor at Stanford. He was appointed to the Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University in 2001. Since 2007, he has been a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

He has been a project manager at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and a member of the Ministerial Council for Research at the Ministry of Culture and Communication. He has directed the National Research Program on Soils and Erosion and the "Vitreous Materials" research group at the CNRS. He is in charge of the "Matériaux oxydes-OXYMORE" network in the Île-de-France region. He was Chairman of the Physics of Minerals Commission of theInternational Mineralogical Association, President of the Société française de minéralogie et cristallographie, Vice-President of theEuropean Mineralogical Union and a member of the Stanford Environmental Molecular Science Institute. A member of the Board of Fellows of the Society of Glass Technology, he headed the Structure-Property Relationships in glasses technical committee of theInternational Commission on Glass and has been involved in numerous editorial activities. Chairman of the evaluation committee of the Centre national de recherche technologique (CNRT) "Nickel et son environnement" in Nouméa, he is also a director of the Bureau de recherches géologiques et minières.

Awards

Georges Calas is a member of theAcademia Europaea, a correspondent of the Société royale de Liège and a foreign member of the Royal Society of Canada. He has been awarded the Carrière, Ivan Peyches and Dolomieu prizes from the Académie des Sciences, the Léon Bertrand prize from the Société géologique de France and the Schlumberger medal from the Mineralogical Society. He is a Fellow of : Mineralogical Society of America, Geochemical Society, European Association for Geochemistry, Society of Glass Technology.