He is member of the French Academy of Agriculture, has been Vice-President of the French Geotechnical Group (CFMS), Chief editor of the “Revue Française de Géotechnique” and “Géotechnique Letters” (ICE London). He serves since 2013 as Chair of the Technical Oversight Committee of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, in charge of supervising the activities of their 37 Technical Committees.
He developed researches on the fundamental mechanisms governing the macroscopic response of multi-phase soils and rocks submitted to changes in stress, water content and temperature, including Martian regoliths, in the framework of the on-going NASA InSight mission on Mars. He co-authored 360 papers and communications in international journals and conferences and co-edited 12 special issues of journals or conferences proceedings, including the 1st Int. Conf. on Unsaturated Soils in Paris (1995), the 18th Int. Conf. on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (Paris 2013) and the 3rd European Conference on Unsaturated Soils (Paris 2016), that he chaired.