I am an astronomer, working at the European Southern Observatory, in Garching, Germany.
I am an astronomer, working on extragalactic topics. I am presently working at ESO,
the European Southern Observatory in Garching (Germany), "en détachement" from CRAL,
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (France), where I also hold an Astronomer Position.
After following some specialised classes in Maths and Physics, in the Quartier Latin (Paris), I obtained
the right to rest and enjoy life...
One of the first astronomy books I had to read during my PhD was the superb (but long) Binney & Tremaine on Galactic Dynamics. Since then, I entertain the illusion that I am a 'dynamicist', trying to understand the motion of stars and gas in galaxies. I started modelling (see e.g., MGE) early, and more recently moved to 'simulations' (all virtual...). Dynamics!
I have been lucky enough to be there when the first TIGER spectrograph was mounted and exploited at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. Since then I have seen and contributed to a few generations of IFUs as we call them: TIGER-2, OASIS-CFHT and OASIS-WHT, SINFONI, SAURON, MUSE...
Two projects I contributed to since their beginnings, writing pipelines and co-leading the infamous (but great) A3D team. An amazing scientific and human adventure over nearly 20 years.
Admittedly (I am not biased) the most beautiful, powerful and successful IFU on this planet! Had the chance to name the beast, and use it.
A superb and ambitious project, led by Eva Schinnerer. I am co-PI'ing PHANGS with Eva, Adam Leroy and Erik Rosolowsky, leading the MUSE effort.
Since the beginning of my PhD I have been developing a simple formalism which I named "MGE" for Multi-Gaussian Expansion and has now been used by many teams around the world to model galaxies (in 1D, 2D and 3D). This very flexible formalism has been applied to gas flows, stellar dynamics, complex modelling (including Schwarzschild techniques) and is a basis for a new framwework allowing the building of bespoke initial conditions (for hydro-dynamical runs on Supercomputers).
Feel free to send me a mail via this form.
I believe in a sensible life balance. Please do not expect a response to your email outside of my normal working hours.