I am an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (1990-1994), and was awarded the agrégation de Génie Mécanique in 1994. During my thesis, I developed (with my thesis advisor F. Hild, DR-CNRS/LMT-Cachan, and C. Cottenot, research engineer at the DGA) a damage model for brittle materials under intense loads. This model introduces a probabilistic aspect for brittle fracture, through a progressive relaxation (or shielding) zones. This original coupling between defect density and relaxation zones naturally reveals a scale depending on the loading speed and on some characteristics of the defect statistics. As a post-doctoral fellow at the CEA, I was interested in damage modeling for ductile metals, whose particularity is to allow cavitation with an unstable growth phase, or inflation. This particularity was then used to propose a more general cavitation damage model, conceptually close to the model proposed in my thesis. My current research activities concern the development of multiscale models for crystalline materials under intense loadings. These approaches are notably used to understand martensitic solid-solid phase transitions appearing during intense loadings. For many of these models, molecular dynamics provides the input data and is used to validate the model by a one-to-one comparison.