Economist Statistician

Since February 2019, I have been in charge of implementing and developing the Toulouse University Social Sciences Data Service (PUD-T).  The PUD-T is hosted by the Toulouse Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities (MSHS-T) and is a local branch of the national research infrastructure IR* PROGEDO aimed at developing facilities for the archive, documentation and availability of data.

At the PUD-T, we address the entire Toulouse academia (including students and staff) providing (in concert with data librarians, IT services and DPOs):

1. trainings (notably via Urfist Occitanie and the Ecole des Docteurs de Toulouse)

2. individualized support, guidance and tutoring

3. scientific partnerships for research projects (e.g., ANR ObARDI and VICO), in which case it needs to be financially compensated

4. organizing scientific events (e.g., the annual Semaine Data SHS in December and Love Data Week in February) 

on quantitative data and methods in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), and more precisely on:

1. finding and accessing data

2. survey design and (secondary) analysis: questionnaire design, sampling methods, inferential statistics and multivariate analysis

3. F.A.I.R. research data stewardship throughout the entire data lifecycle in compliance with the European GDPR

4. quantitative methods and the use of relevant statistical software for reproductible science

Regarding research, I have worked on Migration and how it interacts with Development and in particular with respect to Human Capital accumulation and skills transfers. I adopted an empirical interdisciplinary approach (Sociology, Anthropology, and History) mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in both data collection and analysis in order to unveil the complexity of the social processes at stake as well as estimate the magnitude of measurable phenomena. I spent an extensive time conducting fieldwork and I elaborated, supervised and conducted household surveys:

• on family support to the elderly in Matam region (Northern Senegal) in 2004 for my PhD dissertation

• on return migration in León, Guanajuato (Mexico) in 2010 with sociologist Jacqueline Hagan (UNC-CH)

My research has been published in both Economics and Sociology peer-reviewed journals and I have had the opportunity to present my work at international conferences and workshops worldwide. Our book, Skills of the "Unskilled" published at University of California Press with sociologists Jacqueline Hagan (UNC) and Rubén Hernández-León (UCLA) won the Outstanding Book Award of the section on "Inequality, Poverty and Mobility" of the American Sociological Association.

 Over the last 20 years, I have been teaching and conducting training (in French, English and Spanish) in Economics, introduction to Social Sciences and quantitative methods (Statistics, Econometrics…) at various higher education institutions in France (ENAC, TSE, TBS, TSM, UT Capitole, UT2 Jean Jaurès, UT3 Paul Sabatier), and abroad (in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Mexico, Spain and Senegal) to students from both Economics and non-Economics majors at all levels (Licence, Master, PhD) as well as workers (continuing education) and even more recently providing training in quantitative data management and methods to researchers sometimes quite reluctant to Math and Statistics... My teaching philosophy is to be as accurate and rigorous as possible in concepts I teach making sure to adapt to the public, which means, when dealing with introductory courses or training dealing with Math or Stats, avoiding presenting obscure formulas but rather trying to present rigorous intuitions and providing examples that speak to them. Recently, I have been leading a pedagogical project with various PUD engineers aiming at developing pedagogical open datasets and teaching support derived from various high-quality large surveys.

I have also been collaborating with the European Commission, the OECD and the World Bank for short term consultancy contracts.