François Louchet received an engineering degree at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines (Nancy, France), the "Agrégation" degree in Physics, and a PhD in Solid State Physics. For more than 30 years he has been Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at Grenoble University (Grenoble Institute of Technology). He was also Invited Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), invited scientist at the Balseiro Institute, Bariloche (Argentina), and at Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic), Guest Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), OCMR Distinguished Lecturer at Mc Master University, Hamilton, and Kingston University (Ontario, Canada). He is the secretary of the Data-Avalanche Association, and a member of the European Physical Society and of the French Physical Society. Now retired, he keeps on with his research activity, more particularly on theoretical aspects of instabilities in Physics and Geophysics.