Hugues is a senior scientist at the CEA-Saclay, France. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1989 from Université Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris. After a short postdoctoral stay at Bell Laboratories, he joined the condensed matter physics department in Saclay. His research covers a wide range of topics ranging from nonlinear dynamics to statistical physics and critical phenomena to active matter. He was recently the leader of the Advanced Study Group “Statistical Physics of Collective Motion” at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. He has served on the board of Physical Review E and as a Divisional Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters .
He will introduce the new emerging field of active matter that deals with the collective properties of self-propelled particles, and then focus on the 'dry' case where the fluid in which the particles move can be neglected. He will present their current knowledge and some recent advances, and argue that statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics tools are necessary for a theoretical understanding of active matter, even in this case.