The research department

The GERS department is a research unit at Gustave Eiffel University. It conducts research and provides support for public policy (expertise, development of technical doctrine, standardization at the national and European level) in the field of geosciences (geotechnics, geology, hydrology, environmental chemistry, geophysics, and auscultation) applied to civil engineering and urban planning.

The GERS department was created on January 1, 2013, during the restructuring of Ifsttar (EPST), from which the university was partly derived. The GERS department has around 150 staff members (~85 permanent staff), spread across six laboratories (i.e. teams) on three campuses: Nantes, Marne-la-Vallée, and Lyon:

Geotechnical Centrifuge

Water and Environment

Geomaterials and Environmental Interactions

Geophysics and Non Destructive Evaluation

Rockfall Risk and Geotechnical Structures

Soils, Rocks, and Geotechnical Structures

In January 2023, the GERS department signed a partnership agreement with the GéoCoD and TEAM research teams at Cerema:

GéoCoD: Geomaterials and Geomechanics: couplings and dynamics for geotechnical structures and risks

TEAM: Transfers and interactions linked to water in built environments

The GERS department is a member of the Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers Nantes Atlantique (OSUNA), the Fédération de Recherche IRSTV (FR 2488) and the GIS Theorem (research infrastructure dedicated to marine renewable energies).