Since January 2025, I am leading a long-term research program, the Stellar Winds Atlas, to systematically map the evolution of massive stars and their final fates. My research confronts the uncertainties in stellar wind modeling, which are a dominant bottleneck in astrophysics. By exploring a wide range of wind prescriptions within a common stellar evolution framework, this atlas aims to identify the fundamental physics controlling the formation of Wolf-Rayet stars and  black holes. I have begun with a systematic analysis of mass-loss rate discrepancies (Paper I) and their impact on black hole progenitors at solar metallicity (Paper II), and will expand this framework to explore these critical pathways at lower metallicities.

In order to form black hole binaries (BH-BH) that can quickly merge and emit detectable gravitational waves, isolated massive binaries might need to face mass transfer events to alter their orbital architecture. If these events lead to the binary to merge before forming a BH-BH, if the accretor is a neutron star or a black hole, they could lead to the formation of hypothetical Thorne-Żytkow objects. In my research I studied how the expansion of donor stars and consequently their structure evolution can affect not only the formation rates gravitational wave sources, but also the birth of hybrid stars.

One of the great sources of uncertainty in our understanding of black hole formation is how their progenitors evolve. Very massive stars are characterised by extreme luminosity levels and very peculiar internal structures, which greatly alters the wind-driven mass loss. This may greatly affect not only the final mass of black holes, but also the supernova properties just prior to their formation, and in turn also the dynamics in binary or higher order systems. In this series of papers that we are about to submit, we bring improvements in the wind and internal mixing prescriptions and see how they affect the evolution of massive stars and in turn our estimates of the gravitational wave sources population.

One of the key issues in stellar astrophysics is that the evolutionary models do not always agree with each other. Be it from different implementations of the same theory or completely different prescriptions, we can see that differences get increasingly more striking when we deal with both massive stars in binaries. Using as a reference Melnick 34, which is one of the most massive binaries ever observed, we show how models can predict very different outcomes for its evolution.

This was my first research as a leading author. Rivinius et al. (2020) showed in his observations that inside the HR 6819 system might reside the black hole that was the closest to Earth at that time. When the news came out we analysed with our population synthesis tools that a system with a black hole in that orbital configuration might exist in the first place. The extremely low formation probability in both isolated systems and globular clusters that we estimated supported the following observations that other astronomers (Rivinius included) made and that showed that no black hole is actually hiding in the orbit of HR 6819.

The Einstein Telescope will be a third-generation gravitational wave observatory that will allow to "to explore the Universe through gravitational waves along its cosmic history up to the cosmological dark ages".

Our goal is deploying a space telescope to extract from the emission spectra the exoplanets' biosignatures,  in order to understand whether their atmospheres contain elements that match the presence of biological activity.  

My membership started during my Master's degree in Belgium, when I participated to an astrobiology program in Bordeaux and I was consequently invited to join the French Astrobiology Society.

I am collaborating and exchanging ideas with several colleagues regarding the formation of life on other planetary environments and its potential signatures.