Research Director (DRCE) at Inria
Part-time professor at Ecole Polytechnique
Welcome to my professional web page at Inria, where I lead the Lifeware project team (follow-up of the Contraintes project-team) in the Saclay research center (in Paris-Rocquencourt up to 2015).
I'm a senior research scientist (DR1) interested in logic and computation, and in the design of high-level modelling/programming languages.
Most of my current research is now in computational systems biology and synthetic biology, where I see
cells as machines,
chemical reaction systems as programs,
and develop analysis and design tools for chemical reaction networks, rooted in fundamental computer science.
Since 2002, I coordinate the development of the biochemical abstract machine (BIOCHAM) modelling and analysis software based on formal methods ranging from graph theory to model-checking and symbolic computation. We use this software to tackle challenging biological questions in cell signalling, cell cycle control and circadian clock, and synthetic biochemical circuit design. In course, we develop a computational theory of chemical reaction networks, now with a rich focus on its analog computation paradigm.
Because of the importance of symbolic computation, optimization and constraint-based methods in this work, I also keep a research activity in constraint logic programming for declarative modelling and solving combinatorial or continuous optimization problems.