Rate My Professor Cedric Simenel

Professor Cedric Simenel is Head of the Department of Fundamental and Theoretical Physics in the Department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications at the Australian National University. He earned his MSc from the University of Paris, PhD in 2003, and Habilitation to Supervise Research in 2012 from the University of Caen, France. Earlier in his career, he conducted research at CEA Saclay's Service de Physique Nucléaire and served as a visitor at ANU from 2009 to 2011. Simenel received an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2012. His research focuses on quantum many-body dynamics in nuclear physics, employing time-dependent Hartree-Fock and Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approaches to investigate heavy-ion collisions, fusion, quasifission, and fission processes, including shell effects and their role in superheavy element synthesis.

Simenel authored the book Quantum Many-Body Dynamics: Applications to Nuclear Reactions (VDM Verlag, 2010) and key papers such as Impact of pear-shaped fission fragments on mass-asymmetric fission in actinides (Nature, 2018), Heavy-ion collisions and fission dynamics with the time-dependent Hartree-Fock theory and its extensions (Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics, 2019), and Nuclear quantum many-body dynamics: From collective vibrations to heavy-ion collisions (European Physical Journal A, 2012). With over 7,000 citations and an h-index of 49, his contributions have advanced understanding of nuclear reaction mechanisms. He supervises graduate students, leads the nuclear reaction dynamics group, and collaborates on initiatives like the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics.