Flavien 

"As far as my career is concerned I have practically grown up at Saint-Gobain. Five years out of my 8-year professional experience have been spent with the Saint-Gobain family, and I must say these have been years well spent. I joined Northboro R&D center (NRDC) fresh out of my PhD at Ecole Normale Superieure and the exposure opportunities as well as the people interaction quality I have received have helped me mold myself into, I hope, a well-rounded professional.

I started at NRDC within the Competency Research Laboratories (CRL) as a member of the mechanical/modeling group and had the chance to collaborate with more than a dozen different business units, each one of them being an additional opportunity to discover new people, different management methods, original products or diverse business models… During this period I could feel that the atmosphere at Saint-Gobain is one of cooperation, support and innovation. We partnered with other colleagues to develop new characterization methods, invent modeling tools predicting product behavior or troubleshooting processes. Challenging, rewarding and fascinating daily work.

Then I had the opportunity to coordinate a large industrial project from NRDC within the Performance Plastics (PPL) Foams &Tapes business unit involving multiple efforts from different divisions including process engineering to better understand the different leverages, operations and maintenance teams to evaluate capability, marketing to improve customer’s intimacy as well as academic research to dig deep in the physics at stake. It was an amazing experience which broadens my horizon, learning from great people with diverse backgrounds and a reality check on the essential skill to understand everyone’s perspective.

I was recently offered the challenge to take on the responsibility of R&D group Leader for PPL-Coated-Fabrics at Merrimack, NH. Being the principal R&D center for Saint-Gobain in North America, NRDC is a key partner for the PPL-Coated-Fabrics business. Therefore we have many projects in collaboration with several different teams from NRDC and I have the pleasure to keep on interacting with people I have known for several years now, develop relationships and whose expertise I greatly esteem.

NRDC is a vibrant community based on exchange and open collaboration around a large breadth of scientific challenges fed by a large pool of businesses (Ceramics, Abrasives, Polymers, Fabrics, Habitat…). I have learned, grown and am thankful to many people from that workplace."

Flavien 

R&D Group Leader / Principal Scientist