Vito Rubino, Associate professor at GeM, will present his work to obtain the accreditation to supervize research (HDR) on December, a 2025 at 2pm at Centrale Nantes (Lecture Hall E) on the subject :
Dynamic shear rupture behavior and evolution of friction
Find out more about Vito’s career and work >>
> Composition of the jury
Rafael ESTEVEZ, Professeur, Université de Grenoble Alpes
Jean-François MOLINARI, Professeur, École Polytechnique de Lausanne
Gioacchino VIGGIANI, Professeur, Université de Grenoble Alpes
Harsha BHAT, Directeur de Recherche, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure
Nicolas CHEVAUGEON, Professeur, Nantes Université
Michel CORET, Professeur, École Centrale de Nantes
Ioannis STEFANOU, Professeur, École Nationale Supérieure de Technique Avancée
> Abstract
Vito Rubino’s research lies at the intersection of solid mechanics and geophysics. Vito obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2008. His PhD work, under the supervision of Professors Vikram Deshpande and Norman Fleck, was on the collision and blast resistance of sandwich structures. His work investigated the fundamental behavior of sandwich structures and resulted in important implications for their design and manufacture. After a two-year experience in industry working on R&D projects with Airbus UK, in 2011 he started his postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in the Department of Aerospace (GALCIT), under the supervision of Professor Ares J. Rosakis and Nadia Lapusta. He then became Research Scientist at Caltech in 2015. During that time, he developed a novel experimental approach to capture the full-field behavior of dynamic shear ruptures and track the evolution of friction in real-time, which enabled to test existing friction laws and formulate new ones as well as to discover new rupture dynamics phenomena.
He joined GeM as Maître de Conférences at École Centrale de Nantes in 2022, after earning a NeXT Junior Talent award. Vito is a member of the Thematic Research Unit (UTR) on Structural Dynamics, Processes, and Seismology (DYNAST), and leads the Geomechanics platform at GeM since 2024. At Centrale, Vito continues to pursue his research interests in rupture dynamics. He teaches various mechanics courses in the Department of Mechanics, Materials, and Civil Engineering, including Dynamics, Structural Mechanics and Continuum Mechanics.