Clement Fortin

Clément came to Skoltech with an established record in education, research and innovation, having years of management and leadership experience both in academia and industry. He has been the Director of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal from 2005 until 2010 and a Professor in this institution since 1987. Dr Fortin has been very active in curriculum reform at École Polytechnique. From 2006 until 2010, he was Co-chair for the Americas, of CDIO (Conceive —Design —Implement —Operate), an initiative born in the Aero/Astro department of MIT that proposes an  innovative educational framework for educating the next generation of engineers.  He also led the development of a new Aerospace Engineering Program, in collaboration with Bombardier Aerospace and École Nationale d’Aérotechnique.

In his research work, Clément Fortin has worked extensively with students and research staff in the field of advanced manufacturing and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), particularly in computer aided geometric tolerancing, integration of design and manufacturing, computer aided process planning, product development methodologies, additive manufacturing, high performance machining and geometric error corrections of 5-axis machine tools. He is a member of the Canadian Academy of Engineering since 2014. In June 2015, he was awarded the status of Professor Emeritus for his exceptional contributions to Polytechnique Montréal.

From 2010 until 2014, Dr Clément Fortinwas President and Chief Executive Officer of the Consortium for Research and Innovation for Aerospace in Quebec (CRIAQ).CRIAQ is open-innovation  research consortium dedicated to the development of collaborative research projects aiming to enhance the competitiveness of the aerospace industry and the technical and profession-al skills of tomorrow’s researchers. All CRIAQ research projects are university led and included a minimum of two universities/research lab and two companies. The CRIAQ model has made a very significant impact on the R&D level in universities and aerospace companies and is recognized in a number of countries for the excellence of its open-innovation model.

From his previous research work in the field of PLM, Clément created and led Polyplan Technologies Inc. The company developed an innovative PLM solution for concurrent engineering enabling the definition of process plans for complex products with complementary BOM management, while efficiently integrating PLM and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications.