Profile

I am physicist. I came from Belgium 5 years ago and I live close to Oxford. Besides physics, I enjoy tennis, photography and listening to progressive rock. I also like cooking and mobster movies.

I work on a combination of applied mathematics and high performance computing. Basically, this amounts to making calculations on some of the world’s largest computers.

This has led me to making simulations of waves crashing on an offshore rig or  the airflow around a speeding car for example. I have also been involved in genetics where we tried to understand the origin of some diseases by digging into huge heaps of data. Finally, I am also trying, within my work, to come back to cosmology and particle physics which is my passion as well as my background.

I am not at all involved in fancy experiments using huge and impressive apparatus with lots of pipes, blinking lights and wires dangling. I mostly sit at a desk, doing calculations on a sheet of paper or writing code that is going to compute the answer.

Nevertheless this can be exhilarating when we realise that our calculations can reproduce or help us understand something we observe.