About

I grew up in countryside Belgium near medieval town Tournai. My vocation for astronomy came relatively late, which may be partly assigned to unhelpful Belgian weather. After a Star Wars marathon, I moved to the other side of Belgium for a bachelor in Physics, followed by a master in Space Sciences, at the University of Liège. During my master program, I was fortunate to meet Olivier Absil who facilitated an internship at ESO Santiago with Dimitri Mawet and Julien Girard. During the internship, I had the chance to go twice at Paranal to improve the calibration procedure of VLT/NACO. By the end of this amazing 3-month stay, my eyes were filled with stars and I wanted to continue with a PhD. 

In March 2013 I joined the team of Simon Casassus at the University of Chile for a PhD on imaging of interactions between circumstellar discs and embedded planets, which became a joint-supervision thesis with Olivier Absil. This gave me the chance to observe many times at the VLT. After graduating from my PhD in July 2018, I went on another adventure in Australia, as a postdoc at Monash University in the team of Daniel Price and Christophe Pinte, that further sharpened my skills in planet-disc observation and modeling.

In September 2021, I returned to my Alma Mater for a FNRS postdoctoral fellowship in the PSILab, and turned lead developer of the high-contrast imaging package VIP. In September 2023, I paused the fellowship for a postdoc position at KU Leuven dedicated to JWST data analysis. In December 2025, I became permanent staff scientist at the IRFU institute of CEA Paris-Saclay to do more protoplanetary disk science using JWST, and to prepare and (soon) exploit ELT/METIS in the field of exoplanet and disk imaging.