Jean-Noël Roux got his PhD, working under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Pierre Hansen in Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, about the dynamics of simple liquids approaching the glass transition.

Since 1991 he has been employed by LCPC, recently renamed as IFSTTAR, the French government civil engineering institute.

He is currently working in a joint laboratory with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Ecole des Ponts, Laboratoire Navier, in a group involving researchers studying various complex and disordered materials: porous media, suspensions and foams.

He also collaborates with the laboratory géotechnique group.
He has been studying the rheophysics, micromorphology and mechanical constitutive laws of granular materials and other particulate media for a little more than 20 years, mostly in quasistatic conditions or in dense flows.
His work relies a lot on DEM and similar numerical simulation methods, but also strives to compare numerical results to experiments on model systems.