Exoplanetary system imaging
Since 2004, I have been
involved in several projects
dedicated to the direct
imaging and the
spectro-polarimetric
characterization of exoplanets
at wide separations (1 to
500AU), mainly Jupiter-,
Neptune- and super-Earth-like
planets around young nearby
stars.
In 2004, I worked at
the Subaru telescope on a high
contrast imaging apodizer
(PASP paper) in the context
of the Terrestrial Planet
Finder (TPFC, NASA). The
instrument I studied is now
used or foreseen in several of
the North American instruments
for exoplanet imaging.
I then
spent four years (2006-2010)
at the Paris Observatory
(France) doing research and
development in high contrast
imaging using both laboratory
experiments and numerical
studies for both space
missions (SPICES, ESA Cosmic
Vision) and ELT
(PhD
manuscrit and
defense, CRAS,
A&A , and
A&A on the Self-coherent
camera that calibrates and
reduces the speckle noise and
A&A on an ELT achromatic
coronagraph that attenuates
the stellar light to look for
faint objects in its
neighborhood).
Between 2010
and 2012, I was a
postdoc at the Herzberg
Institute of Astrophysics in
Victoria (British Colombia,
Canada). I reduced all the
images taken at Keck, Gemini
North, Gemini South, VLT, HST
for the International Deep
Planet Survey by direct
imaging from 2001 to 2015. I
also worked on statistics to
determine the giant planet
frequency around nearby MFGKA
stars (A&A). In
this paper, I listed
several objects that could be
Jupiter-like planets. Some
have been confirmed to
be background stars,
others are still to be
re-observed. I also
developed a background
subtraction technique to
obtain the first image of
exoplanets at M-band
(ApJ). I
confirmed that the
object called Fomalhaut~b in
the 2010s
was real
(ApJ). I was involved in
the development of the
official pipeline for the
Gemini Planet finder
Instrument (GPI) and I
published the first detection
of an exoplanet with the GPI
instrument
(HR 95086 b, A&A).
Since 2012, I work at the
Lira,
laboratory of
Observatoire de
Paris and
Université Paris
Cité as an associate
professor. I develop new
instruments and new strategies
of observations for high contrast
imaging (numerical simulations and
laboratory demonstration,
e.g.
A&A and, telescope
demonstrations,
A&A), I developed
tools for the community (as a
data processing software, A&A) and I use the
current instruments like
SPHERE/VLT to develop new
strategies of observations
(A&A). Finally,
Johan Mazoyer and I wrote a
review
(CRAS) for the newcomers in
the field of high contrast
imaging in astronomy (master
and PhD students, new
researchers, etc).
Biological
microscopy
Since 2019, I am the principal
investigator of the
biological imaging
team at the
Lira. We
develop a microscope
to enable the ex-vivo
imaging of 1cm3
sample (e.g. whole
clarified rodent
brain) with a
resolution of
1µm3. We
combine a confocal
microscopy and an
optimized adaptive
optic system. We
then associate this
microscope to a
lightsheet
illumination to
speed up the imaging
of the whole
sample. We
collaborate with the
team of Jonathan
Bradley and Laurent
Bourdieu at the
Institut de Biologie
of the École Normale Supérieure.