There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are sciences and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Louis Pasteur, 1871

I believe that this sentence best captures my trajectory:

• from fundamental scientific endeavors (as a PhD student), to challenging scientific questions requiring innovative solutions (as the leader of the Bioimage Analysis and Modeling research group);

• from my studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, up to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the ETH Zürich.

Along my path at the interface between scientific and engineering disciplines, I have acquired a unique set of skills and developed a versatile attitude towards research.

Early in my studies, I focused on understanding how complex systems evolve and adapt to their ever-changing environments, by studying natural and artificial evolution, together with cognitive and neuro-sciences.

In addition to my main curriculum in Biology, I embraced studying mathematics as a unifying language to gain a deeper insight of complex dynamical learning systems.

The scientific melting pot and the freedom that I experienced at ENS Paris imprinted a strong taste for multidisciplinarity and gave me momentum to continue along this challenging path. Since this period, I have nurtured my interest for the applications of mathematics to scientific and engineering problems.

This has allowed me to evolve in a wide variety of environments:

• as a master student, at Ecole normale supérieure de Paris (ENS Paris), one of the foremost research and education centres (see the wikipedia page for an historical background),

• as a PhD student, in a leading molecular biology lab in a large hospital (former U1001 INSERM unit known as TaMaRa lab at Necker hospital, Paris), under the supervision of Dr. François Taddei,

• as a post-doc, in a research group in Computational Biology founded by one of the youngest assistant professor at the Computer Science department (D-INFK) of ETH Zürich (MOSAIC group lead by Prof. Dr. Sbalzarini, now in TU-Dresden), and

• as a team leader, in one of the leading lab in computer vision, at the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering department at ETH Zürich (D-ITET) in the Medical Imaging group led by Prof. Dr. Székely, in the Computer Vision Lab.

The common denominator to my contributions is to design multidisciplinary projects that combine my expertise in applied mathematics and computer science to imagine new solutions to challenging real-world problems.

In addition to concrete and practical solutions, I also believe that interdisciplinary research requires

• the ability to showcase the resulting work according to the highest publication standards in each discipline and

• the dissemination of well-designed software solutions accompanying our research.

I have always encouraged this practice among my collaborators.

My enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity and learning-by-doing was channelled by François Taddei, my PhD advisor. I helped him layout ground principles for an education that promotes:

• a student-centered education: shifting the focus from the teacher to the learner by encouraing a proactive education;

• a research-driven pedagogy: using research as a pedagogical template to foster the development of critical thinking through project-driven learning;

• a collaborative mindset: by creating a safe environment where each student can be more creative, collaborative, and learn from their mistakes.

François Taddei has since then fully committed his career to innovating in education. Together with Ariel Lindner, he founded the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity. He writes and talks regularly about innovation in education.

In addition to these strategic developments, I was a teaching assistant in introductory biology at the Pierre et Marie Curie university.

I also designed and taught several original lectures, both theoretical and hands-on: introductory biology for mathematicians, evolutionary biology, and introductory statistics. For more details, see my CV.

At ETH Zürich, I reinforced my learning-by-doing mindset alongside engineers and researchers. As a post-doc and later as a senior scientist and group leader, I had the opportunity to supersive and train students at the master and PhD level.

I believe that research requires skills and tools that are not necessarily acquired during the traditional curriculum of a student. Therefore, I have always put a particular emphasis on filling these gaps by focusing my efforts on developing the:

• strategic skills necessary to structure a research project in intermediate reachable goals
• communication skills necessary to convey the key results to both experts and non-experts
• emotional skills necessary to deal with, and to learn from failures
• technological stack to help the daily activities, using tools such as git/github, slack and literal programming (org mode, jupyter notebooks)