Biography

Florent Leclercq

Domus Omnibus Una

I was born in 1988 and grew up near Paris, France. After having finished my secondary education in 2005, I underwent the intensive training of the French classes préparatoires at the Lycée Henri IV, in preparation for the nationwide competitive examinations to the Grandes Écoles.

Pour la Patrie, les Sciences et la Gloire

In 2008, I entered the École polytechnique, considered to be one of the most selective and prestigious of the French Grandes Écoles, and underwent the four-year undergraduate-postgraduate "Ingénieur Polytechnicien" programme.

As part of the school curriculum, I received a military and sportive training as an officer cadet in the French Army in Barcelonnette, France, in September 2008 and military leadership training as an officer in La Courtine, France, in September 2010 (I was in charge of the nursing care aspects for the training of a company of about 100 cadets).

My interest in the diffusion of scientific knowledge began during an eight-month pedadogy and leadership training from October 2008 to April 2009 in Perpignan, France. During this civilian service, I was in charge of the development and coordination of the scientific training of primary school teachers and of helping teachers to develop good pratice examples for teaching science.

During my stay on the École polytechnique campus, I took part in many student activities and in the organization of various events (mostly related to fencing and artistic fencing as well as the annual Bal de l'X). In particular, I was president of the 18th International Fencing Challenge of the École polytechnique, the biggest student fencing competition in Europe (200 competitors, 3 days, an organizing team of 30 students and a budget of 25,000€).

Scientia Imperii Decus et Tutamen

I obtained my Masters in 2012 from the High Energy Physics joint program of the École polytechnique and the ETH Zürich.

From February 2012 to September 2015, I worked at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris in Benjamin Wandelt's group. I defended my thesis on 24 September 2015, and was congratulated by the jury for the "exceptionally strong scientific content of this PhD, which pushes forward the state of the art".

From October 2015 to September 2017, I was a postdoc at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation of the University of Portsmouth. There, following the trajectory of my PhD, I studied the morphology of the cosmic web in a series of projects using information-theoretic tools.

From October 2017 to January 2022, I worked at the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, first as Imperial College Research Fellow (ICRF, October 2017-September 2021), then as Ernest Rutherford Fellow (ERF, October 2021-January 2022), funded by UKRI STFC. My research evolved to include more data science and information science, in particular in the exploration of the new and exciting area of simulation-based cosmological inference.

Dépasser les frontières – Hic et ubique terrarum

Since February 2022, I have been back at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris as a CNRS researcher. I hold an interdisciplinary position at the interface between astrophysics and information science, to work on massive data analysis in cosmology.