Xavier Robert
Appointment
Junior Fellow Academy - Alumni
Institution
Institut de recherche pour le développement
Country
France 
Xavier Robert is a Research Scientist with the Institut de recherche pour le développement, a French public research institute working for the development of Southern countries. He was a CIFAR Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2011, supervised by Earth System Evolution Program Fellows Alessandro Forte in the Département des sciences de la terre et de l’atmosphère at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Kelin Whipple in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and Peter Reiners in the Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona. Xavier completed his PhD in Earth Sciences at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France in 2008. He also holds a Master’s degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from the same university, and completed his Agrégation of Earth and Life Sciences at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France.
Xavier’s research to date has focused on the evolution of mountain belts. He has devoted much of his work to exploring the links between erosion, other processes that shape landscapes, and active tectonic movement within mountain belts. Xavier uses a variety of techniques to study this evolution across multiple scales of space and time, including field experiments, computational modeling, and especially low-temperature thermochronology – the study of the correlation between time and rock temperature. During his Junior Fellowship, he plans to extend his research to larger space-time scales by focusing on how the evolution of major structural variations in the deep earth has influenced the shape of the Earth’s surface on regional scales. This work will integrate the techniques mentioned above with studies of the evolutionary formation of rivers and plateaus.
Xavier’s research to date has focused on the evolution of mountain belts. He has devoted much of his work to exploring the links between erosion, other processes that shape landscapes, and active tectonic movement within mountain belts. Xavier uses a variety of techniques to study this evolution across multiple scales of space and time, including field experiments, computational modeling, and especially low-temperature thermochronology – the study of the correlation between time and rock temperature. During his Junior Fellowship, he plans to extend his research to larger space-time scales by focusing on how the evolution of major structural variations in the deep earth has influenced the shape of the Earth’s surface on regional scales. This work will integrate the techniques mentioned above with studies of the evolutionary formation of rivers and plateaus.