From January – December 2023, MechE Prof. Natasha Vermaak recently spent her sabbatical at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris-Saclay, hosted by the Laboratory of Mechanics Paris-Saclay (LMPS), a premiere solid mechanics research unit in France and globally. ENS Paris-Saclay is part of the University of Paris-Saclay, a world-ranked research institution (15th in the 2023 Shanghai Ranking) and the leading research university in France. LMPS houses over 220 people in three teaching and research departments and four major research teams at the forefront of experimental and computational solid mechanics. Vermaak’s inviting host was her colleague and collaborator Dr. Francois Hild, an internationally recognized expert and an original pioneer of full-field image-based measurement techniques in experimental solid mechanics (e.g., Digital Image Correlation, DIC). DIC is a non-contact and full-field measurement approach that uses the comparison of digital images of an object to extract information about its deformation and motion.
Learn more below about Vermaak’s sabbatical experience, which she calls “one of the most professionally rejuvenating experiences of my career."
At LMPS, I spent much of my time at the lab’s 1500 m2 Experimentation and Development Center, furthering my research in using image-based field measurements to detect the arrest of cyclic plastic accumulation events. I joined the LMPS Operational Research Unit Eikology, a research team managed by Dr. Stéphane Roux that has developed field-leading approaches to quantitative imaging for experimental mechanics. This year spent at LPMS, with the Eikology team, and in such a large and collaborative research environment will continue to inform my research agenda in the Vermaak Lab at Lehigh.
In addition to conducting research at LPMS, I gave several well-attended research talks at ENS. I was also invited to give seminars and/or research visits at the Solid Mechanics Laboratory (LMS) and Center for Applied Mathematics (CMAP) at École Polytechnique, the Mechanics Department at the Univ. of Lille, SIMaP at the Univ. of Grenoble, ESPCI Paris - PSL, and the Department of Engineering at the Univ. of Cambridge. These and other activities offered opportunities to reconnect with old colleagues and forge new professional relationships across geographic and disciplinary frontiers.
On the personal side, I got to return to France (where I also spent two years as a postdoctoral scholar) with my husband and two young children. Thus my professional experiences were interspersed with numerous family adventures—from the extraordinary, like our visit to the Les Machines de L’ile in Nantes and a ride on its 12-meter-high mechanical elephant, to the mundane, like weekend trips to the local farmers markets or parent-teacher conferences at our daughter’s French public school. Being in France at ENS with my family in tow made this year truly remarkable professionally and personally.
By definition, a sabbatical is a departure from the status quo. During sabbatical leave, faculty are released from a majority of their core activities at Lehigh. This leave offers faculty opportunities to pursue new avenues of research, to expand a project, or to simply reflect on their research trajectories past and future. For any researcher, taking a sabbatical is a challenge because it means a departure from familiar routines of academic life. A sabbatical leave abroad presents even greater challenges, and for many, it is simply an untenable proposition for a multitude of reasons—professional and personal alike. I thus feel exceptionally fortunate that the stars aligned to make this opportunity possible. I am grateful for the many people who made it a reality, including my department Chair Arindam Banerjee, Dean Stephen DeWeerth, and Provost Nathan Urban at Lehigh. I believe that the support I received speaks to the high value that the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, and Lehigh as a University, places on collaborative international research. I am also deeply thankful to my host Dr. Francois Hild and LMPS Director Pierre-Alain Boucard and Associate Director Véronique Aubin at ENS Paris-Saclay for their support and guidance throughout my sabbatical.
If you are interested in a sabbatical abroad, there are important resources and guidelines on Lehigh’s Faculty Affairs website — Academic Leaves. Vermaak also found these external resources helpful: recordings on maximizing your sabbatical experience from the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development (NCFDD), the Tales from Sabbatical three-part series published in the journal Matter by Prof. T.D. Sparks (see part I: Planning Your Leave), and the Adventures of Faculty Sabbatical Leave episode from This Academic Life Podcast run by Profs. K.M. Lewis, P. Newell, and L. Zhang.