Stéphane Avril is a Professeur de classe exceptionnelle at Institut Mines Telecom affiliated at Mines Saint-Etienne in France. He runs a group of 20+ in soft tissue biomechanics, with a special focus on constitutive modeling and identification using imaging techniques. He was the director of the CIS center for biomedical and healthcare engineering (70+ people) between 2010 and 2020 and is now the director of SAINBIOSE (INSERM endorsed laboratory with 150+ researchers). Within SAINBIOSE he leads a team working on vascular dysfuntion.

Stéphane received his PhD in mechanical and civil engineering in 2002 at Mines Saint-Etienne (France). After positions at Arts et Métiers ParisTech (France) and Loughborough University (UK) where he developed the Virtual Fields Methods, Stéphane returned to his alma mater in 2008 and extended his broad experience of inverse problems to soft tissue biomechanics, especially regarding aortic aneurisms in close collaboration with vascular surgeons. Stéphane was a visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor (USA) in 2008, a visiting professor at Yale University 6 times between 2014 and 2019, guest professor at TU Wien between 2020 and 2022 and guest professor at TU Graz between 2021 and 2022.

Stéphane has received many awards and distinctions including ICCB best communication award (2017), Editor’s Choice Paper Finalist – ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering (2016), ESB best poster award (2015), BSSM 50th Anniversary Plenary Speaker (2014), Wolfgang Pauli fellow (2020). He has led 3 national ANR grants in soft tissue biomechanics and supervised 45+ PhD students and post-docs. In 2015, Stéphane was awarded an ERC (European Research Council) consolidator grant of 2m€ for the Biolochanics project on: Localization in biomechanics and mechanobiology of aneurysms: Towards personalized medicine. In 2022 Stéphane was awarded an ERC (European Research Council) prooof of concept grant.

Most of Stéphane’s research is aimed at improving the treatment of cardiovascular diseases by assisting physicians and surgeons with biomechanical numerical simulations.

In 2017, Stéphane co-founded Predisurge, a spin-off company of IMT at Mines Saint-Etienne. PrediSurge offers innovative software solutions for patient-specific numerical simulation of surgical procedures. In 2024, Stéphane co-founded KaomX, another spin-off company of IMT at Mines Saint-Etienne. KaomX develops a novel imaging device for elasticity measurements in cell mechanobiology.