Espace Presse – Irene Joliot-Curie Prize for Berenguer Dubroglie, Scientist of the Year

Awarded by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation with the support of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Technology, the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize aims to promote the position of women in research and technology in France. Bérengère Dubrulle is the winner of the Female Scientist of the Year award, for her outstanding contribution to public research.

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In the status of women in science, we start from afar! Neither Marie Curie nor Irene Joliot-Curie, although both Nobel laureates, have been accepted into the Academy of Sciences. There is still progress to be made, even if the CEA and CNRS work to make women’s place more visible in science.explains Berenguer Dubrell.
The Joliot-Curie Prize is typical in that it also enables women scientists to be introduced and thus encourage careers. I am a good example of this: My letter was born when I was eight years old, when I discovered pictures of Marie Curie working on a history book. We need female role models in science so that today’s young girls can identify with them and embark on a scientific career as well. »

disorders specialist

Bérengère Dubrulle is a physicist who explores turbulence in fluids and their applications in astrophysics and geophysics such as the formation of the solar system or extreme weather changes. “All natural, geophysical and astrophysical systems contain fluids. On Earth, the atmosphere and the ocean are fluid. And in all of these fluids there is turbulence. It is the state of fluids that manifests itself in the appearance of vortices. These eddies in the atmosphere can be large cyclones, tornadoes and tornadoes,” she explains. Anticyclones and hurricanes. There are also some in the ocean. »

After joining the CNRS in 1991, Bérengère Dubrulle worked at the Institute of Meteorological Research in Tsukuba (Japan) and then began studying discontinuity in turbulence from 1994. In 2001, she joined the State Physics Intensive Service (SPEC, CEA/CNRS/Paris- Saclay University) as Research Director to work on theoretical and experimental interpretations of astrophysical or geophysical phenomena.

Dissipation in Turbulent Systems: Promising Research

Among other important works, since 2015 Bérengère Dubrulle has been very much involved Opening a new field of research by studying energy dissipation within turbulent motions in a viscous fluid. His team thus demonstrated the existence of several types of rare and intense energy dissipation events through a viscosity-independent process, on a small scale.

The control of energy dissipation in fluid flows is a topic of fundamental interest in a large number of fields, such as aeronautics, navigation, astrophysics or climate studies… Understanding turbulence phenomena is therefore an important scientific, technological and economic challenge.

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Until some time ago, we were primarily interested in large scales, particularly for climate modeling on the scale of France or a region. We ended up realizing that we were missing very important phenomena that happen on very small scales, in the form of very intense dissipation events.Berengère Dubrulle confirms.
We recently sought to build an experiment titled Giant Von Karman (GVK), which allows us to get down to these small scales. It is a real technical challenge to monitor turbulence below the Kolmogorov scale*, and it has never been done before. This requires very fast cameras, lasers, an entire battery of image processing as well as complex mathematical theories. However, my goal is to find ways to describe fluids in a light and efficient way, avoiding excessive power consumption of computing resources. This has been the common thread of all my research. »

Raising awareness and transferring knowledge

In addition to the contributions of her work on turbulence, Berenguer Dubrell has been contributing to knowledge sharing in physics in her capacity as Director of the School of Physics at Les Hoches since 2020. She is also involved in the transmission of physics to the general public by participating in many scientific activities. Mediation procedures. In particular, she co-authored the book with CEA climatologist Valerie Masson-Delmotte.
Climate: From our grandparents to your children which educates young people about climate change.

* The scale from which vortices are destroyed by viscosity, by the friction of air molecules. Thus it is dissipated in heat. There are vortices that rotate so quickly, that they can escape this influence, and they live below that range and produce very intense events there.