Published on Tuesday, 22 July 2025 15:22

We were deeply saddened to learn of the death on July 14, 2025 of Gérard Toupance, former director of LISA and former interim president of the University of Créteil.

 

Gérard Toupance, a graduate of ESPCI, spent most of his career as a teacher-researcher at Université Paris XII, now Université Paris-Est Créteil. In 1973, he defended a Doctorat d'Etat thesis devoted to the study of the energy-induced evolution of models of the Earth's primitive atmosphere, using an original atmosphere generator he designed and built. This enabled him to examine the possibility of forming prebiotic compounds in mixtures such as CH4/NH3, CH4/N2 or CH4/H2S under UV irradiation. He was thus a precursor of exobiology, which has become one of LISA's flagship research themes. From the research team he led in René Buvet's laboratory, he created the LPCE (Laboratoire de Physico-Chimie de l'Environnement). In the early 1980s, Gérard Toupance, sensing the potential problems posed by the release of numerous reactive chemical compounds into the earth's atmosphere, took a major scientific turn by focusing his research on air quality and photochemical pollution in particular.  At a time when these subjects were not necessarily considered of interest in the academic world, he carried out highly original work, notably on the physico-chemical processes leading to the formation of ozone peaks downwind of major cities.Convinced of the need to provide public authorities with air quality forecasting tools, he embarked, in collaboration with IFP, on the development of a three-dimensional air quality model. At the same time, as part of the European TOR (Troposheric Ozone Research) program, he set up a measuring station at the tip of Brittany to qualify the quality of incoming air on the European continent. He then initiated a major European air quality measurement campaign in the Marseille region (“ESCOMPTE” campaign), one of the first dedicated to validating 3D air pollution models. He was also heavily involved in a similar campaign in the Paris region (“Esquif” campaign). Air quality and photochemical pollution are, once again, themes that remain at the heart of the laboratory's activities.

 

Over the years, Gérard Toupance has supervised numerous PhD students, many of whom are now major players in the scientific community or in the field of air quality measurement, monitoring and forecasting.

 

Gérard Toupance played a key role in the creation in 1993 of the Laboratoire Interuniversitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques (LISA), a major laboratory in the field of atmospheric sciences which today employs over a hundred people. He was one of its main founders and its first director. In this capacity, he structured and organized the laboratory, but even more so, he endowed it with a philosophy that still strongly influences it today.

 

Gérard Toupance was by all accounts a researcher and teacher of great scientific rigor and honesty. He was committed to promoting high-quality, demanding science that was useful to society, particularly in addressing environmental issues at a time when these issues were not so clearly established.

 

Interment took place on Monday July 21, 2025 in the Journet cemetery (Vienne).