Gilberte Chambaud - Biography#
Professor Gilberte Chambaud graduated in Chemistry and Physical Sciences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Fontenay aux Roses. In 1972, she became a member of the academic staff at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She defended her Doctorat es Sciences at University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris 6) in 1980. She was promoted as full Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1985. She was appointed as Guest Professor for one year at University of Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 1991. She joined the University of Marne-la-Vallée in 1992 as Professor in Chemistry. She was president of the Board of Directors of this University (2001-2005).
She was Deputy Director at the Chemistry Department of the Ministry of Research and Education in 2003-2005.
From January 2006 until May 2011, she was the Scientific Director of the Department of Chemistry at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, Paris). During this period she devoted a lot of efforts to strengthen the collaborations between the European Agencies for research in Chemistry (Germany, NL, Spain, Italy) and she established strong connexions with China via the creation of several common laboratories (Xiamen, Zhengzhou, Dalian and Shanghai).
From September 2011 until 2014, she was Scientific advisor at the AERES (National French Agency for Evaluation of Research and formation), in charge of the coordination of evaluation of the academic Chemistry laboratories in France.
Her research activities are oriented towards theoretical Molecular Physical Chemistry. She proposed reliable predictions in terms of reactivity, stability and identification of intermediate molecular species, structural determination of molecular systems and accurate spectroscopic characterisation. Her main results concern the determination of electronic structures and properties, using highly correlated electronic methods, and the determination of rovibrational spectra, going in some cases beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation and involving the couplings of angular momenta (electronic, vibration, rotation, electron-spin). This was a new orientation in France at the time when she started these studies. She is interested in the electronic structure and properties of negative ions, particularly of interest for atmospheric and interstellar media. A large part of her activity is also on the structure and spectroscopy of metallic compounds (MX, MX2) and she was able to determine, for the first time, the physisorption interaction of successive layers of H2 molecules on metallic surfaces. She contributed to the development of codes for rovibrational spectroscopy (determination of energy levels and transition intensities) involving all the dimensionality of the angular momenta couplings. Starting 2008, she oriented her interest on multiscale models for mechanical and piezoelectric properties of nanowires of semiconductors as ZnO, AlN and related multi-scale properties.
She has supervised 18 PhD students and has written more than 139 publications in International Journals (H=20), 150 Conference Proceedings and was invited in more than 70 national and international conferences. She is author or co-author of 12 text-books in Physical Chemistry. She organized 8 International Conferences.
She was Coordinator of the European Network of Theoretical Chemistry Laboratories (THEOCHEM II) in 2000-2003, President of the Education Division in the French Chemical Society in 2000-2004, and member of the European network “Tuning Project” for the European harmonization of the University trainings at Bachelor and Master levels. She created in 2006 the French Network of Theoretical Chemistry and in 2008 she launched the french-chinese network in Theoretical Chemistry. She has been administrator of the French Chemical Industry Association and of the synchrotron SOLEIL.
She was distinguished by the French Legion d’Honneur in 2007, and Officer of Palmes Académiques 2012. She is Président of the French Chemical Society (since 2015).
