Pierre-Jean Cottinet received the electrical engineering diploma and M.Sc. degree in Acoustics from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquees (INSA) de Lyon, France in 2008. He is currently a Ph.D. student at INSA de Lyon and is working on electroactive polymers and their applications for actuators and energy harvesting. This work included the development of electroactive polymer composites exhibiting electromechanical coupling for environmental energy scavenging applications and large electric field actuation performance. The study consisted in a better understanding of the physical mechanisms of the conversion, but also on the development of new methods for enhancing the energy extraction and new actuator design. The research work is also interested in the study of magnetoelectric effect in particulate and laminate composites.