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Meet our Team

Jean-Nicolas BRUNET

Jean-Nicolas BRUNET

PhD Student, R&D Engineer

jean-nicolas.brunet@inria.fr

Biography

Member of the Inria MIMESIS research staff. Research activities focus on computer assisted medical training, planning and guidance. My responsibilities involve the development as well as the evolution of the real-time computation and data-driven simulation models available within the open-source SOFA framework. Patient-specific applications vary from augmented reality liver surgery assistance to surgical training.

I completed my doctoral thesis (Ph.D) in computer science in Strasbourg, France, and my master thesis (M.Sc.A) in computer science engineering in Montreal, Canada. So far, my main contributions can be found on real-time simulation of linear elastic and hyperelastic objects using meshless and immersed boundary methods.

I am also the main contributor of the caribou project, bringing non-linear finite elements and hyperelastic materials to SOFA.

Doctoral thesis

Selected as part of 16 PhD students for the High Perfomance Soft Tissue Navigation (HiPerNav) European project funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant. My research focused on the development of new numerical methods for the simulation of soft tissue deformations in the context of augmented reality surgery assistance and was conducted under the supervision of Stéphane Cotin, Research Director at Inria and leader of the MIMESIS team. Several research initiatives have been put in place to identify new methods for solving deformable dynamics that are not only accurate and fast, but also robust enough to manage unpredictable and often non-physical inputs. The first part of my thesis focused on the so-called meshless or element-free methods. The second part of the thesis was dedicated to the traditional methods of discretization with isoparametric elements. However, unlike traditional finite element methods, the concept of fictitious domains was investigated.

Master thesis

Joined the Inria MIMESIS team as a research internship. Main responsibilities included the analysis of meshless methods for real-time surgical simulation applications using the well-known SOFA Framework. Recipient of a Mitacs Globalink fellowship.

Publications