Wlodek Kofman, research director emeritus (CNRS), géophysician and planetologist

Born on 14 January 1945 in Leningrad, Wlodek Kofman returned to Poland, his parents' country of origin, that very year.  A student at Warsaw Polytechnic and a mathematics student at a university, he was imprisoned without trial for five months following the student strikes and protests in March 1968. Faced with the impossibility of continuing his studies or finding suitable work due to the anti-Semitic policies of the Polish authorities at the time, he asked to leave the country but, in order to do so, had to renounce his citizenship, like many of the 15,000 Poles of Jewish heritage who left Poland between 1968 and 1972. He applied for refugee status in France, which he obtained in 1969, and moved to Grenoble where he completed his doctorate in geophysics.

Since then, Wlodek Kofman has been involved in a variety of endeavours, including the international project of EISCAT (European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association) and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) space mission Rosetta, which on 12 November 2014, successfully landed the robot Philae on comet Chouri, more than 500 million kilometres from Earth.  “CONSERT", one of the ten tools on board the robot, designed to study the internal structure of the nucleus in order to construct a 3D image, was developed under his responsibility.

In honour of his contribution to CONSERT, an asteroid discovered on 18 October 1998 was named Wlodekofman (or 1998 UV 24).
His work has been published in over 200 peer-reviewed journals and presented at numerous scientific conferences. In 1999, Wlodek Kofman founded the Grenoble Laboratory of Planetology (LPG), which merged in 2009 with the Grenoble Astrophysics Laboratory (LAG) to create the Grenoble Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics (IPAG).

He has collaborated and continues to collaborate with many foreign scientists working in various institutes in Europe, the United States and Japan and has effected extended stays in these institutes.

Wlodek Kofman was Editor-in-Chief of Annales Geophysicae, the journal of the European Geosciences Union and a member of the ESA Space Science Advisory Board.

He is currently Visiting Professor at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, CA, USA.
In 2014, he was elected as a corresponding member of the French Air and Space Academy (AAE). In 2015, he was distinguished as Chevalier dans l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight in the National Order of the Legion of Honour).