Jacques Malavieille

Jacques Malavieille (; born October 12, 1953, in Mende, Lozère) is a French geologist. He is known for research combining geological fieldwork with analog modeling, and with some computer modeling, for scientific understanding of lithospheric deformation.

Biography Jacques Malavieille grew up in that part of the valley of the river Lot located in the department of Lozère. As a small boy, he enjoyed searching for rocks and fossils in the mountainous region of the Massif Central. Malavieille's habilitation thesis, supervised by Mattauer, is entitled Les mécanismes d’amincissement d’une croûte épaissie, les "Metamorphic Core Complexes du Basin and Range" (USA). Malavieille was employed by the CNRS from 1982 to 1994 as a Chargé de recherches (CR, Scientist) and from 1994 to 2002 as Directeur de recherches (DR, Senior Scientist). He was from 1999 to 2003 Directeur du Laboratoire Géophysique, Tectonique et Sédimentologie (UMR 5573 of the CNRS) and from 2003 to 2012 Directeur de recherches 1ère classe. From 2012 to the present, Malvieille has held the appointment Directeur de recherches Classe Exceptionnelle (DRCE) at Géosciences Montpellier of Montpellier 2 University. He specializes in research on deformation of lithosphere underlying orogenic domains of Earth's continents. and the Tibetan Plateau. He has also done fieldwork in Taiwan, which is located on a convergent boundary between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate, and in the Rocky Mountains of the US and Canada. In 2012 he received the Stephan Mueller Medal of the European Geosciences Union. the Geological Association of Canada's Dave Elliott Best Paper Prize. The prize for best paper in structural geology and tectonics published in 2011 honored their article Thrust wedges with décollement levels and syntectonic erosion: A view from analog models. In 2014 he received the Prix Paul Fourmarier of the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium. In 2020, the “Prix Dolomieu“ (Grand prix de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris) for works on orogenesis.

He is the father of three sons.