I am a French theoretical biologist, trained as an engineer, interested in how biological traits emerge from the interactions between molecular mechanisms, ecology, and evolution.
To address these questions, I develop mechanistic models of genotype–phenotype mappings, connecting genes to phenotypic traits.
Using mathematical and computational approaches, I explore in particular how environmental conditions and contingency arising from mutation and migration shape these relationships.
Along the way, I have developed a persistent (and arguably unhealthy) fascination with defining what “fitness” actually means in complex, interacting biological systems—matched only by a similar obsession with enzymes and what they really do and cost, both being shaped by compromises that rarely allow everything to be optimised at once (a lesson I learned the hard way while trying, for years, to reconcile a passion for jumping with an equally serious devotion to baking and pâtisserie). I am aware that this tendency also shows up in my fondness for long, slightly tortuous sentences—perhaps a residual German-philosophical inclination—which I balance with a more British sense of style, whose natural culmination is the bow tie.
Accordingly, and somewhat inevitably, my current work in the M3 Group focuses on how bow-tie metabolic architectures shape microbial communities, their ecological interactions, and their evolutionary dynamics.
Along the way, I have developed a persistent (and arguably unhealthy) fascination with defining what “fitness” actually means in complex, interacting biological systems—matched only by a similar obsession with enzymes and what they really do and cost, both being shaped by compromises that rarely allow everything to be optimised at once (a lesson I learned the hard way while trying, for years, to reconcile a passion for jumping with an equally serious devotion to baking and pâtisserie). I am aware that this tendency also shows up in my fondness for long, slightly tortuous sentences—perhaps a residual German-philosophical inclination—which I balance with a more British sense of style, whose natural culmination is the bow tie.
Accordingly, and somewhat inevitably, my current work in the M3 Group focuses on how bow-tie metabolic architectures shape microbial communities, their ecological interactions, and their evolutionary dynamics.
