From 1992 to 1997, I studied applied sciences at the Université libre de Bruxelles. I then took up on Prof. Paul Mandel’s offer to make a PhD under his supervision. My first research was on laser dynamics and, more generally, light-matter interaction. This led me to marvel about nature’s richness of behaviors when nonlinear effects come into play.
At the end of my PhD (2001), I wanted to go back to more applied subjects, while exploiting some techniques that I had learned during my thesis years. This opportunity was given to me thanks to a long postdoctoral stay at the University of Oxford (2001-2004) within the Oxford Center for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM). These years had a permanent impact on the way I carry out research. Through contacts with researchers at this center, notably John Ockendon, Peter Howell and Jon Chapman, I learned to mathematically model a variety of physical situations which arise in industrial contexts and could strengthen my skills in asymptotic techniques. But above all, I acquired the reflex to think in terms of limiting cases when confronted to complex problems, the art being to keep the essential aspects in the simplification. This is fundamental to me, as I believe that to understand is to be able to explain.
Thereafter, I could pursue my scientific career thanks to a postdoctoral grant of the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS and finally, in 2008, thanks to a permanent position in that institution. In recent years, I have combined applied and more fundamental research. On the one hand, I have collaborated with experimental groups (ICFO, Twente) on photovoltaics and biosensing. On the other hand, I had a closer look at nonlinear waves, spatio-temporal instabilities, and so called “beyond-all-orders” calculations in perturbation methods. More recently, I collaborated with the experimental-theoretical group led by Fabian Brau (ULB) on questions of elasticity, possibly coupled with fluid mechanics.