Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Lorraine, doing research at Inria and LORIA and teaching at IUT de Saint-Dié

Member of the Tangram Inria/LORIA Project Team

Pierre-Frédéric Villard obtained a PhD in Computer Graphics from the University Claude Bernard Lyon I in 2006. He worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School in the Simulation Group, at the CIMIT laboratory, and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (2006-2007). He joined the Department of Biosurgery and Surgical Technology at Imperial College as a Research Associate (2007-2009). In 2009, he was recruited as a lecturer at Lorraine University. In 2013, he spent one month as an invited researcher in the Visualization and Medical Graphics group at the School of Computer Science, Bangor University (UK). He was a visiting Professor at Harvard University (2014–2016) at the Harvard Biorobotics Lab led by Professor Robert D. Howe.

He has been involved in numerous national and international collaborative projects in computational medicine and medical simulation. He was WP leader in the ANR project PreSPIN. He was engaged in long-term collaborations with Uppsala University through the Swedish Research Council-funded projects INVIVE (2017–2020) and REVIVE (2021–2024), co-supervising PhD students with annual research stays in Sweden. He was leading the Inria associate team CURATIVE with Harvard University, dedicated to the computational modeling and simulation of mitral valve. Earlier in his career, he supervised several research projects, including on a liver biopsy simulator (CRaIVE, 2007–2014, UK Health Technology Devices), a hernia treatment simulator (HeROSS, 2009–2011), the ANR project ASPI – Talking Head Model (2009–2013) and regional projects such as a laparoscopic dissection simulator (2012–2014). In 2025, he was involved in the “Mitral Valve Digital Twin” project funded by the Springboard Programme for bilateral UK–France partnerships, in collaboration with the University of Glasgow.

Since February 2017, he has been the principal investigator of Inria associate research team CURATIVE .

Since June 2017, he has been involved in the Swedish Research Council (VR) project INVIVE .

Since January 2021, he is WorkPackage leader in the ANR PreSPIN .

His main research interests are in medical visualization and simulation, augmented reality, and image-guided surgery. He especially focuses on Biomechanical Modeling, Virtual Reality in Medicine, Medical Image Processing, and Augmented Reality in Medicine.