Professor Johan Gaume

Johan Gaume obtained his mechanical engineering and Master's degrees in 2008 from the Grenoble Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. from Grenoble Alpes University in 2013. He was then a postdoctoral researcher at WSL/SLF in Davos. In 2016, he joined EPFL as a Research and Teaching Associate with extensive visits to UCLA and UPenn. From 2019 to 2022, he was an Assistant Professor at EPFL and head of the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory. Since 2022, he is Associate Professor of Alpine Mass Movements at ETH Zürich, a position which is jointly affiliated with the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Davos, Switzerland. He is a member of the Science Alliance of POW - Protect our Winter.
His research interest is in the initiation and propagation of gravitational mass movements with a particular focus on snow and avalanche mechanics, including the development of multiscale methods based on computational geomechanics validated using laboratory and field experiments. His work on snow avalanches was extended to model glacier calving and tsunamis as well as multiphase alpine mass movements. He is also known for proposing, together with his colleague Alexander M. Puzrin, a plausible explanation to the Dyatlov Pass Incident, a famous Russian Cold case. His work improves the physical understanding of slope instability and mass flows with impacts on applied research related to risk assessment and management in mountainous regions.