I am a French astronomer working in the field of high angular resolution visible/infrared astronomy. I started working in astronomy a couple years after the first announced discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting a Solar-type star... and have somehow always been working for the development of the techniques, that someday will provide images of such planets. I also have some observing experience, mostly using Adaptive Optics from at the Palomar Hale Telescope, Keck II, and of course, Subaru.

I currently work for the Japanese Subaru Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii, where I primarily contribute to the development of an Extreme AO upgrade to for the camera HiCIAO: the SCExAO project. As of March 2012, I am now rehired as a senior scientist for the same project: in 2012, SCExAO is going to undergo its final engineering obsevations, and will be ready for scientific observations. My mission is therefore slowly shifting to accomodate this exciting evolution of the project.

Before working for Subaru, I was a Research Associate in the Astronomy Department at Cornell University. I was taking care of an observing program with non-redundant aperture masking interferometry, primarily conducted at Palomar Observatory in California and Keck in Hawaii. These observing programs, except for a few exotic targets, were essentially about finding faint companions in the close neighborhood of M- and L- dwarfs (i.e. small and cold stars and brown dwarfs). Some of these observations led to some very high precision dynamical masses on a couple of interesting objects. All of these results used the self calibrating properties of the amazing closure-phase, a concept first developed for radio-interferometry that found its way into the optical/IR. The level of calibration obtained with closure-phase reveals subtle structures in a regime of angular resolution where coronagraphy hasn't achieved much yet... although I hope to somewhat change that with SCExAO!

Recently (Nov 2011 - Jan 2012), I spent a summer at the University of Sydney, in New South Wales, Australia, developing a couple new ideas on a recent invention called Kernel-phase: a generalization of the concept of closure-phase, compatible with redundant apertures, if the wavefront quality is sufficient... Check out the interferometry section of this webpage for the latest updates on this project!