Thinking big

Jacques Farineau is the newly arrived senior adviser to Norbert Holtkamp on industrial matters. Like his scientific counterpart Gunter Janeschitz, he will work across departments in a "transverse integration" role. He will act as the interface between the various suppliers to ITER in his capacity as an expert on all aspects of industrial companies—evaluating their capacities and being the main point of contact for the international organization. He will be dealing with coordination of the on-site industrial activities of the Domestic Agencies as well as with mitigating industrial risks and making sure that industrial aspects are taken into account at each level of activity. Interfacing with CEA, he will also develop and monitor the needs of the organization for any industrial involvement, short and long term.

Prior to coming to ITER he has had a long career at Airbus in Toulouse—24 years in fact. There he has gained the kind of experience that will be invaluable to ITER: working in a global and international enterprise with fully owned subsidiaries and spare parts and training centres; industrial cooperation and partnerships with major companies all over the world; four main sites in Europe each producing a complete section of the aircraft, which is then transported to the Airbus final assembly lines in Toulouse or Hamburg.

Plenty of similarities with ITER there ...

He started work at Airbus after completing his doctorate in engineering at the ONERA research centre at Toulouse, working on the A320 initially, followed by a project that saw him working in collaboration with industry in China. The last seven years were spent heading systems development activities on the new A380 aircraft, from the blank page to the delivery to the final assembly line—a project he describes as incredibly exciting and challenging, with ambitious deadlines and with the situation that if the A380 project failed, then Airbus would be in a dramatic position.

Jacques has moved recently to Aix, where his partner and two children will join him in January.