Home

Hello, and welcome! I am (since September 2024) an assistant professor (“Maître de Conférence”) in Paris, sharing my time between the Physics department of Sorbonne Université (where I teach) and the LUX department of the Observatoire de Paris (where I do research).

My research interests embrace various aspects of the formation of galaxies at high redshift. I spend most of my (research) time thinking about the Epoch of Reionisation: this correspond to the first billion years of the Universe, during which massive stars and active galactic nuclei (AGN) shine and ionise the surrounding Intergalactic Medium (IGM). I focus on the following broad questions:

  • How do early galaxies form their stars, and how are they affected by the subsequent feedback?
  • How do massive black holes at the centre of galaxies grow and power AGN, and how does this impact their host?
  • How much ionising radiation is produced by these galaxies, and how much of it escapes to reionise the Universe?

I address these questions using cosmological simulations, mostly with the AMR code RAMSES. Since 2023, RAMSES is officially recognised by the French CNRS as a “community code”, and I actively participate to the corresponding service d’observation.

While primarily working with simulations, I am deeply convinced that our theoretical understanding of the Universe heavily relies on careful comparison with observations. For this, I have (co-)developped tools to create synthetic observations from simulations, such as the RASCAS radiative transfer code.

I am also leading a large simulation project called Obelisk designed to model the formation of a protocluster environment until the peak of cosmic star formation (around z ~ 2). The simulation has been applied to multiple studies, including quantifying the relative contribution of galaxies and AGN to cosmic reionisation, Lyman-α radiative transfer, black hole mergers in the early Universe, and the properties of Little Red Dots observed by JWST.

Before landing in Paris, I defended my PhD in 2016 at the CRAL / Observatoire de Lyon under the supervision of Jérémy Blaizot, and then moved to the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, where I worked with Marta Volonteri. I then stayed for about a year and a half in Heidelberg, in Germany, working jointly at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA) with Annalisa Pillepich and at the Zentrum für Astronomie (ZAH/ITA) with Ralf Klessen and Simon Glover, and then decided to move to Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands, to work with Pratika Dayal as a post-doctoral fellow at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute.