Alessandro Morbidelli, planetologist at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, is an associate member of the Académie des sciences and the Académie royale de Belgique. He headed the National Planetology Program (PNP) at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) from 2010 to 2018, and has chaired the Solar System thematic group at the Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES) since 2019. Since 2021, he has also been editor-in-chief of the international journal Icarus, dedicated to planetology and founded by Carl Sagan. As an expert in the theory of conservative dynamical systems, he now devotes his research to the formation and evolution of planetary systems, with a particular interest in the history of the solar system. Using numerical simulations, he has demonstrated that the current structure of the solar system is the result of a phase of dynamic instability of its giant planets, which occurred during the first 100 million years of our system. In 2020, he received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop a coherent model of Earth formation, in line with astronomical and cosmochemical constraints. He has received numerous awards, including the Urey Prize from the Planetary Science Division of the American Astronomical Association in 2000, the Grand Prix Mergier-Bourdeix from the Académie des Sciences in 2009, and the CNRS Silver Medal in 2019.
In 2023, he was elected Professor of Planetary Formation : from Earth to Exoplanets at the Collège de France.
