Biography

I was born and grew up in France. After graduation from the Ecole Centrale de Paris, a higher education establishment for engineers, I completed a PhD program in molecular biology and biophysics at the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, France. The same year, I was appointed staff scientist of the CNRS, and joined the biological NMR laboratory at the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg. In 1997, I came for a sabbatical to Stanford University. I liked California so much that I decided to stay: in 2004, I joined the University of California, Davis, with a joint appointment as Professor in the department of Computer Science and the Genome Center.

I have always liked mathematics, physics and biology and this is serving me well in all my research endeavors. With the advent of high-throughput technologies and the concurrent advances in information sciences biology has become a data-rich science. It is clear that new computational approaches to analyzing data must be developed to take advantage of this wealth of information. There is also a need to integrate this information into models of biological activity and interaction that will enable us to control, manipulate, and create biological systems. Developing new physical and mathematical methods as well as efficient and robust algorithmic implementations within that framework has been the driving force behind all my research projects.

The geometry of the Sindbis virus