Appoint­ed Direc­tor of UTC, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, Com­pieg­ne, in 2017, Dr Philippe Courtier tru­ly seeks to see his insti­tu­tion progress in the frame­work of the HE clus­ter Sor­bonne Uni­ver­si­ties (SU) and to widen the vista and scope of UTC stu­dents to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the world of high-class research. To bol­ster this vision, the class return 2018–19 will see a series of Inau­gur­al Lessons tak­ing place on campus. 

a vil­lage called Melle, in the Deux-Sèvres depart­ment when, as the say­ing goes, Philippe Courtier was only knee-high to a grasshop­per, he suc­cumbed to the charms of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. His Grand-Father as a cre­ative and impas­sioned chemist. “He even gained his PhD with­out first get­ting his Bac­calau­re­ate and, indeed, was the first sci­en­tist in the fam­i­ly” and Philippe adding that, with him, he had been proud to learn the art of blow­ing glass recip­i­ents, etc., used in his Grand Dad’s lab­o­ra­to­ry. At the age of 12 he helped his engi­neer Father, with oily hands-on, to repair the fam­i­ly car engine, after a crank­shaft fail­ure. Aged 13, he was into “spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty”, thanks to a book by George Gamow and that start­ed him delv­ing into and devour­ing all the books in the fam­i­ly library on this sub­ject. Hence our sur­prise to hear him say how bored he had been at his Lycée Joseph Des­fontaines, in Melle. How­ev­er, the state of bore­dom was not to last long.

He was admit­ted to the class of 78 and grad­u­at­ed from Ecole poly­tech­nique; he chose the École nationale de la météorolo­gie as his “école d’appli” because of his “acquired taste and propen­si­ty for sci­ence”. It was at ENM in the course of his end-of-stud­ies lab­o­ra­to­ry intern­ship that he dis­cov­ered the mean­ing and pur­pose of doing research. Con­se­quent­ly, he decid­ed to do a PhD and he pre­sent­ed a the­sis on appli­ca­tion of opti­mal con­trol the­o­ry to weath­er fore­cast­ing (at Méteo-France, viz., the nation­al weath­er cen­tre and at the LMD (lab­o­ra­to­ry for dynam­ic mete­o­rol­o­gy stud­ies-CNRS. His research was done with “com­put­ers not exceed­ing 128 kilo­bytes mem­o­ry” but nonethe­less allowed him to use his obser­va­tions for weath­er fore­cast­ing and opened the door to the ECMWF (Euro­pean Cen­tre for Medi­um-Range Weath­er Fore­casts (Read­ing, UK). “It is the pre­mier cen­tre of its kind in the world, five years ahead of the USA in this par­tic­u­lar field” , he explains. Philippe Courtier has authored numer­ous sci­en­tif­ic papers, receiv­ing a prize award from the French Acad­e­my of Sci­ence and one from the Roy­al Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Soci­ety, and his career accel­er­at­ed in grand man­ner thereafter.

After a term of work with the CNES (France’s nation­al space agency) fol­lowed by time at the Lab­o­ra­to­ry for Dynam­ic and Cli­mate-relat­ed Oceanog­ra­phy, in 1999 he was appoint­ed, Deputy Direc­tor Gen­er­al for Méteo-France at the age of 41. He stayed with Méteo-France for 5 years and chaired the sci­en­tif­ic com­mit­tee of the World Weath­er Research Pro­gramme (WWRP), 2002 ‑2005. It was as of this point that his career shift­ed its head­ing, from research sci­en­tist insti­tu­tion­al senior man­age­ment positions. 

Director* of UTC

/*equivalent to Pres­i­dent & Vice-Chan­cel­lor for an Anglo-Sax­on estab­lish­ment. In 2017 at the age of 59, Philippe Courtier was appoint­ed to the posi­tion of Direc­tor of UTC, a uni­ver­si­ty which trains some 4 000 stu­dent engi­neers and 300 PhD stu­dents each year. Ques­tion — What are your vision and project for UTC with­in the HE clus­ter Sor­bonne Uni­ver­si­ties? PC- “It is UTC that car­ries the project, not me. The role of the Direc­tor and his team of col­leagues is to serve the insti­tu­tion and to ensure it pro­gress­es”. The two key advan­tages for the engi­neer­ing school, as he sees them, are pri­mo that, although UTC is ‘young’, it enjoys a strong rep­u­ta­tion for poten­tial can­di­dates’ fam­i­lies. The Direc­tor under­scores the fact that 90% of the stu­dents admit­ted earned a “Très Bien” rank­ing (³16/20) in the Bac­calau­re­ate. “In the space of 40 years, UTC has become a key play­er in High­er Edu­ca­tion in France”; sec­on­do, the UTC staff are all high­ly com­mit­tee to their estab­lish­ment. This is why Philippe Courtier refus­es the notion of “his project” and prefers “the insti­tu­tion­al project car­ried by the entire UTC community”.

There is, how­ev­er, one weak point in UTC, accord­ing to Phillipe Courtier, its size, both in terms of under­grad­u­ate stu­dent engi­neers and PhD stu­dent pop­u­la­tions. “Oth­er tech­nol­o­gy-inten­sive uni­ver­si­ties in Europe are at least twice as big”’, he says. “Cer­tain­ly, our objec­tive can­not be just to grow for growing’s sake, but we should aim at cov­er­ing a wider range of engi­neer­ing fields, to be com­pa­ra­ble to oth­er Euro­pean universities”. 

Ques­tion – what might his growth ambi­tion be? Philippe Courtier sees this tak­ing place in spe­cial­ties where cur­rent­ly UTC is not too present – “water, ener­gy, envi­ron­ment, indus­tri­al engi­neer­ing and dig­i­tal systems”. 

and in terms of greater Euro­pean and world-scale ‘vis­i­bil­i­ty’? He see this hap­pen­ing with­in the frame­work of the Sor­bonne Uni­ver­si­ties HE clus­ter. “Our des­tiny lies with Sor­bonne Uni­ver­si­ties”, Dr Courtier forcibly repeats the cre­do. … and why believe in this?

The first rea­son is the undoubt­ed world image of the Sor­bonne itself. Then sec­ond rea­son is tied to the size of “the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie Curie) with its Fac­ul­ty of Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing and its Fac­ul­ty of Med­i­cine, mak­ing it the largest sci­ence-ori­ent­ed uni­ver­si­ty in Europe and in the “top 100” in the world-class rat­ing”, details Philippe Courtier. Hence his desire to con­tribute to “the devel­op­ment, of the tech­nol­o­gy-inten­sive pole of Sor­bonne Uni­ver­si­ties, the excel­lence of which was con­firmed in 2018 by an inter­na­tion­al jury of experts”.

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 The Inau­gur­al Lessons

n launch­ing the series of Inau­gur­al Lessons, as of year back 2018–19, UTC has the inten­tion to cre­ate “a first pos­i­tive encounter between stu­dents and sci­ence, between stu­dents and high lev­el research”. The first lec­ture will be deliv­ered by François For­get on the theme ‘Explor­ing the Solar sys­tem to under­stand the Earth bet­ter’; the sec­ond lec­ture will be: “Com­mon and dig­i­tal assets”, by Ben­jamin Cori­at, econ­o­mist; and, last but not least, in this ini­tial series of 3 lec­tures “A Primer in Auto­mat­ic Learn­ing Process­es will be giv­en by Thier­ry Denoeux, UTC-GI com­put­er sci­ence depart­men­tal pro­fes­sor and research sci­en­tist at the UTC-Heudi­asyc Lab.