Christel GERVAIS

Christel Gervais is a chemical engineer from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris (ENSCP) and graduated in 1996. She defended her doctoral thesis in  october 1999  in the University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC) now part of Sorbonne University. Her research project, performed under the supervision of Dr. F. Babonneau was focused on the characterization by solid state NMR of polymer derived ceramics (PDCs). Funded by a Marie Curie individual fellowship, she then joined the Physics Department of the University of Warwick (UK) to work on the synthesis and characterization by solid state NMR of TiO₂ and mixed SiO₂-TiO₂ oxide nanoparticles prepared by sol-gel process, under the supervision of Pr M. E. Smith. She was hired in September 2000 at the Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris (LCMCP) as assistant professor. In 2011, she was appointed full professor to develop a research project entitled « Spectroscopy and modeling for structural characterization of materials ».

Her research activities are centered on solid state NMR spectroscopy and deal with the characterization of a wide range of materials including nitride- or oxide-based ceramics prepared by polymeric routes, hybrid systems exhibiting an interface between an inorganic surface and (bio)organic molecules, biomaterials…. Moreover, for a few years, she combined this experimental approach with a more theoretical one based on ab-initio calculations of NMR parameters. Indeed, NMR spectra offer valuable structural information provided a careful analysis consisting for instance in assigning a chemical shift to a well defined structural site. Ab-initio calculations appear therefore a very useful tool to simulate experimental spectra and obtain data on model systems difficult to synthesize. In addition, since materials investigated by NMR are generally disordered or even amorphous, structures used as a starting point for NMR calculations can not be obtained via X-Ray diffraction : therefore she also extended her activities to  ab-initio structural modeling.