Welcome
I am a interdisciplinary physicist working at CNRS, currently affiliated with the Experimental and Theoretical Ecology Station (SETE) in Moulis, France, a leading CNRS ecology research station in Ari&eagrave;ge with unique experimental research facilities.
For 20+ years before, I was an astrophysicist working at the large Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et
Planétologie (IRAP, UMR CNRS 5277, Université de Toulouse), part of the Midi-Pyrenees observatory.
I was notably head of the galaxies, high-energy astrophysics and cosmology group of IRAP, and a membr of its direction commitee, between 2021 and 2025.
In 2023, deeply concerned by the ongoing global crises, I decided to initiate a gradual shift of my research from theoretical and numerical astrophysics (from the Sun to cosmological scales) at IRAP to the impacts of global anthropogenic changes on ecosystems and biodiversity at SETE. I tell the ongoing story of this fairly unusual academic transition in my blog, "Looking up".
Research themes
I am still in the process of building the foundations of my research in ecology, oriented on the theoretical and numerical modelling of ecosystem dynamics in space and time, and how they may shift through sudden bifurcations or more gradual erosion under anthropogenic pressures, with the long-term goal of informing their conservation and restoration.
To get a flavour of the research topics and methodologies I was into during my previous research life as an astrophysicist, fluid dynamicist and plasma physicist using a combination of theoretical methods and high-performance supercomputing, you may be interested in browsing through my publications list, the slides of these tutorials on dynamo theory (review/lecture notes for J. Plasma. Phys. later published here) and MHD and plasma turbulence in accretion disks given at Les Houches winter schools. Also check out this general audience conference on Chaos and Turbulence given at the Estivales de la Malepere (Aude, France).
Academic timeline
I completed a PhD in the former astrophysics laboratory of Toulouse in 2004, and after that worked for two years (2005-07) as a postdoctoral research associate in the Astrophysical Fluid and Nonlinear Dynamics group of DAMTP (University of Cambridge). I was hired at CNRS in 2007 and worked at IRAP Toulouse until fall 2026. I am now affiliated with SETE.
Collaborations
- My main collaborations are with
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- Jose Montoya and Jeff Arnoldi at SETE.
- Alexandre Genin at INRAE Clermont-Ferrand
- Alex Schekochihin at the Theoretical Physics Departement of the University of Oxford and Sir Steven Cowley at PPPL (USA),
- Geoffroy Lesur at IPAG Grenoble, France).
- Jean-Baptiste Durrive and Nicolas Clerc at IRAP.
- Jonatan Jacquemin-Ide, a postdoctoral research associate at CU Boulder, USA.
PhD students
I am currently supervising the PhD thesis of Jules Treton in theoretical ecology at SETE.
In astrophysics and fluid dynamics, I supervised the PhD theses of Jean Kempf (IRAP,2025), and of Subendhu Rawat (IMFT,2015) and Antoine Riols (IRAP, 2014) with Carlo Cossu (then IMFT). I was also a non-official co-supervisor of the PhD theses of Mark Rosin (Imperial College, 2011) and Silvio Cerri (IPP Garching, 2015) in astrophysical plasma physics.