?Mircea Sofonea obtained the PhD degree at the University of Bucarest (Romania), and the habilitation at the Université Blaise Pascal of Clermont-Ferrand (France). Currently, he is a Distinguished Profesor at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia (France) and an Honorary Member of the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy of Sciences.
His areas of interest and expertise include : multivalued operators, variational and hemivariational inequalities, solid mechanics, contact mechanics and numerical methods for partial differential equations.
Most of his reseach is dedicated to the Mathematical Theory of Contact Mechanics, of which he is one of the main contributors. His ideas and results were published in eight books, four monographs, and more than three hundred research articles.