About Me:
Since October 2018, I am a research associate (logisticien de recherche) at the STAR institute of the University of Liege.
You can find my cv under this link. Check out this page for the most up-to-date list of my publications.
My past-lightcone:
Soon after the start of my PhD thesis with Jean Surdej at the University of Liège, I received an ESO Studentship to pursue my PhD at ESO Chile under the supervision of Damien Hutsemékers. During those years I discovered the joy of working in a world-class observatory and learning the subtleties of observation at the New Technology Telescope in La Silla. I spent my research time between the study of AGNs and the one of gravitational lenses through imager, spectrographs and Wollaston prisms. While I was carrying a polarimetric survey of quasars, I discovered the lensed object J1131-1231. In April 2005, I defended my PhD thesis entitled Quasar pairs and gravitational lenses: Observational study and observational applications.
In June 2005, I started my first postdoctoral position at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique (LASTRO) of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with Frédéric Courbin and Georges Meylan. I spent most of my research time collaborating to the launch of the COSMOGRAIL monitoring project, and to study various gravitationally lensed systems.
In September 2008, I started to work as a Humboldt Fellow at the Astronomisches Rechen Institut (ARI), part of the Zentrum für Astronomie of the University of Heidelberg, in the group of Joachim Wambsganss. During that time I strengthened my expertise in quasar microlensing. I developed microlensing as a tool to study the broad line region in AGNs and I obtained the first measurement of the size of that region based on a microlensing monitoring.
In July 2011, I moved to the Argelander Institut für Astronomie of the University of Bonn. Owing to a grant (SL 172/1-1) awarded by the DFG, I pursued there a very fruitful project entitled Developing gravitational lensing techniques to study the properties of dark matter in galaxies.
In September 2014 I moved back to Belgium after being awarded a "Back to Belgium" grant by the BELSPO to carry out research on strong gravitational lensing in the AGO department. of University of Liège.
I spent 2 years at the Belgian Institute of Space Aeronomy, to work in the group of David Bolsée on the data of the SOLAR SOLSPEC instrument mounted on the International Space Station.
Since September 2018, I am Research assistant and associate Professor at University of Liège. I keep using gravitaitonal lenses as a tool to make progresses in our understanding of the Universe and its component. The lead of one of the work package of the ERC-funded COSMICLENS project, allowed me to work and advise several talented researchers (Lyne van de Vyvere, PhD ; Sampath Mukherjee, postdoc ; Matt Gomer, postdoc) with whom we have worked on characterising and improving the use of gravitational lensing for cosmography. In parallel, I kept working on using graviational microlensing to probe the structure of AGN, and milli-lensing to study dark matter substructures.