Bernard Frois


Bernard Frois is a French nuclear physicist, energy policy advisor, and science manager.

Education and career

Frois received his doctorate in physics from the University of Paris. From 1968 to 2005 he was employed at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre as a Directeur de recherche (senior scientist) at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). From 2001 to 2005 he was also a Directeur du Département Energie, Transport, Environnement et Ressources naturelles in France's Ministère en charge de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche. From 2006 to 2010 Frois was a Directeur de Nouvelles Technologies de l'Energie of the Agence nationale de la recherche. From 2011 to the present he has been a scientific advisor for CEA-Liten.
He did considerable research on electron scattering on few-nucleon systems. From nuclear physics he later turned to energy policy and research on energy issues.
Frois was vice-president of the OECD Global Science Forum, chaired the Europe Union's Hydrogen Platform Mirror Group, and served on many international committees. He was a research associate at CERN from 1994 to 1995 and a visiting professor at the University of Utrecht from 1989 to 1990. He held an adjunct professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1987 to 1997. He has served on the Science and Ethics Committee of the Sahara Wind Project.
He is on the governing boards of the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum and the International Partnership for Hydrogen Economy, as well as the board of directors of the European Union's Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking and its successor the Clean Hydrogen Joint Undertaking.
In 1981 Frois was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1987 he was awarded, jointly with Ingo Sick, the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society:
In 1994 he received the médaille d'argent of the CNRS. In 2002 he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite by the Ministère de la Recherche.

Selected publications

  • as editor with Ingo Sick:, World Scientific 1991
  • as editor with Vernon Hughes, N. de Groot;, Erice Lectures 1995, World Scientific 1997
  • as editor with J.-F. Mathiot: Hadronic Physics with Electrons Beyond 10 GeV: Proceedings of the Second European Workshop on Hadronic Physics with Electrons Beyond 10 GeV, Dourdan, France, October 7–12, 1990, North Holland 1991
  • as editor with Marie-Anne Bouchiat:, World Scientific 1999