Prize Recipient

Eric Sonnendrücker
Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

"For establishing and shaping the field of structure-preserving geometric algorithms for plasma physics."

Eric Sonnendrücker was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France) where he received his undergraduate diploma in mathematics from the University of Paris South (France) in 1991 and earned his PhD in mathematics in 1995 under P. Degond and P.A. Raviart. His best-known works include the development of semi-Lagrangian methods for kinetic and gyrokinetic models, the development of novel algorithms for Particle-In-Cell simulations, divergence corrections techniques for the Maxwell and MHD equations and the development of geometric and structure preserving numerical methods. His early career path include positions at CEA (France), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Humboldt fellowship at the Research Center Karlsruhe (Germany), a CNRS position at the University of Nancy (France) before becoming a Professor in mathematics at the University of Strasbourg (France) and since 2012 director of the Numerical Methods in Plasma Physics division at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (Germany) and a Professor in mathematics at the Technical University of Munich (Germany). He is a member of the APS, the SIAM and the French society for applied mathematics.