About
The Story
Perpignan, rocks, and the shape of the Earth
I grew up in Perpignan, in that sun-bleached corner of southern France where the Catalan language still colours the market stalls and the street signs. My roots run deeper than geography: my grandmother was from Viure, across the border in Catalonia. She used to walk to the Thursday market in Figueres, where she would sometimes cross paths with a young Salvador Dalí — a detail that sounds invented but isn't. My maternal grandfather never came home from the Second World War; he was deported to Mauthausen, where he died. That history — of borders crossed and lives broken and languages kept alive despite everything — shaped the way I understand the world long before I ever studied it.
The Pyrenees were right there — close enough to touch, complex enough to wonder about. That wondering led me to geology: first a degree in Montpellier, then a master's in Paris where I learned to make computers think about the Earth, and finally a Ph.D. at EPFL in Lausanne, where I spent four years building algorithms that could mesh the unmeshable — three-dimensional models of geological chaos, written in FORTRAN 90.
My doctoral work took me from the groundwater beneath Lausanne to the diversion tunnels of the Three Gorges Dam. I was, in the most literal sense, trying to give shape to the formless. It turns out that instinct never quite left me.
Twenty-four years in a classroom
In 2000, I did what many scientists do when they discover they love explaining things more than discovering them: I became a teacher. For twenty-four years, I taught mathematics and science to secondary school students in Lausanne — first at the École Nouvelle de la Suisse Romande, then at the Collège du Belvédère.
I became head of the mathematics department. I designed a course I called Découvertes Mathématiques — "Mathematical Discoveries" — because I wanted students to feel that mathematics is not a corridor of closed doors, but a house with windows everywhere. I wrote exam content for the canton. I mentored younger teachers. I sat on the Lausanne Schools Council, arguing for better support for students with special needs.
In parallel, I earned a master's in education and spent five years as a part-time researcher at the URSP, studying how schools assess and integrate. Two published reports came out of that work. Teaching, it turns out, is also a kind of research — one where the hypotheses are tested every morning at eight.
Starting over, at fifty
Somewhere around my twentieth year of teaching, I felt a familiar restlessness. The same curiosity that had once pulled me toward rocks was now pulling me toward muscles, lungs, and the intricate machinery of human performance. So I did what seemed both reckless and inevitable: I went back to university.
A bachelor's degree in kinesiology at the University of Lausanne. Then a master's, specialising in training and performance. My thesis investigated how training the muscles we breathe with affects endurance performance — in normal air and in the thin air of altitude. Roughly fifty athletes. Over two hundred lab sessions. VO₂max tests, spirometry, near-infrared spectroscopy, lactate, PhysioFlow. I learned to speak the body's language through data.
Along the way, I spent a summer at the University of Western Australia in Perth, working with Professor Olivier Girard on sports physiology in extreme conditions. I assisted with biomechanics research using motion capture. And in early 2025, a poster bearing my name appeared at the International Hypoxia Symposium in Banff — a long way, in every sense, from the geology labs of my twenties.
An ocean, a family, a new country
After twenty-nine years in Switzerland — a country that shaped me as much as France did — I made the crossing. My blended family of seven children, a recently obtained green card, and the kind of optimism that only the slightly mad possess. We landed between Highlands Ranch, Colorado and New York: two poles of a new life.
I studied intensive English in Denver (achieving C1 proficiency, a fact I note with the quiet pride of someone who has lectured for decades in a language that was already not his own). I began an associate degree in Exercise Science at Arapahoe Community College. Every new credential here is a bridge between what I know and what this country will let me prove.
What I'm building now
I've never been someone who does just one thing. The thread that connects geology, teaching, kinesiology, and everything in between is this: understanding complex systems and finding ways to explain them to human beings.
Today I'm building three things — MathVaud, EngramKinetics, and Pinterlude — each born from a different chapter of my life but all converging toward the same idea: that knowledge should move, connect, and be alive.
I'm also open to a year or two of research in exercise physiology or sport science. If you're looking for someone who brings twenty-five years of teaching, a fresh M.Sc. in kinesiology, genuine lab experience, and the stubborn curiosity of a former geologist — let's talk.