His areas of expertise are fluid mechanics, combustion, propulsion, acoustics, high performance computing.
Poinsot has taught since 1980 at Ecole Centrale Paris, Stanford, ISAE and ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, Princeton, Tsinghua, Kanpur, CISM,[3] and the von Karmann Institute.
He was head of the MIR group (reactive media) at the Institute of Fluid Mechanics in Toulouse from 2010 to 2017 and member of the scientific council of PRACE[4] from 2008 to 2013.
He has been a consultant for IFP Energies Nouvelles, Air Liquide, Siemens, Daimler, and John Zink, Senior research fellow at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford[5] since 1990, scientific advisor at CERFACS[1] since 1992, chief editor (with Pr F. Egofopoulos, University of Southern California) of Combustion and Flame[6] since 2013, expert at the European Commission for the ERC (European Research Council) programmes since 2014 and member of the Board of Directors of the Combustion Institute[7] since 2016.
In addition, he relies on high performance numerical simulation[8] which consists in creating 'virtual' digital twins of real systems (such as an airplane or helicopter engine) thanks to supercomputers now comprising several million processors (see Top500[9]).