Michel Visonneau, obtained in 1980 an Engineer's diploma and the diploma of Advanced Naval Architecture in 1981 from Centrale Nantes. In 1985, he got a PhD of Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer of the University of Nantes and entered the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as research associate. He was the head of the CFD department of the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory (Centrale Nantes) from 1995 to 2012. In 2001, he defended his Habilitation to supervise Research and was promoted research director at CNRS in 2006.

He has supervised more than 20 PhD thesis.  He is a member of the Steering Committee of the International Workshop on CFD in Ship Hydrodynamics since 2005. He was awarded the 2nd Cray prize for CFD in 1991 and 30th Georg Weinblum lecturer in 2007. In 2006, he built a partnership with NUMECA Int. which gave birth to FINE/Marine (http://www.numeca.com/product/finemarine) and is now in charge of the scientific management of this worldwide distributed software.