I was born in the charming village of Pérouges (see also this link), in the East of France (close to the border with Switzerland). Well, I must confess that technically, I was born at the polyclinic of Rillieu-la-Pape (on the East side of Lyon) and not within the village itslef, but I hope you would forgive me! We quicly moved to the house provided by the school (French primary schools where supposed to provide some accomodation to their personnel). That means that I only had one door between our appartment and the classroom! We lived there until I was 18, when my parents moved out of the village and I moved to Lyon for college.
I went to Lyon for a "DEUG" diploma (equivalent to a Bachelor's degree) in physics at the Lyon 1 university. Then, I got admitted into a college of engineering, the "Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité" or, in short, Supélec (see French "Grandes Ecoles" for explanations on this very specific French system). I went through two years of some general curriculum in Metz (North-East of France, close to the borders with Belgium and Germany) and then I went to the Paris campus of the same college for following a specialization through a "Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies", the "Grands Instruments de la Physique" DEA. Finally, I prepared a PhD in plasma physics in a military research center, the Centre d'études de Gramat, located in the town of Gramat, in the South-West of France (in the "Lot" département).
During my thesis, I was designing experiments for the Z pulser, located at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM). As soon as my defense was over, I moved to Columbus, Georgia, to work on energy production research. I then came back to France for 6 months, collaborating to the launch of a project for a high pressures generator (of the order to 500 kbars, that is 500 000 times atmospheric pressure), the Veloce pulser. I then went to New Mexico in order to keep working on the same project since it was a collaboration between that French company and my NM employer, Ivanhoe Technologies. Since December 2006, I live in Davos, on the East side of Switzerland. I work at SLF, a lab studying snow and avalanches.
Soon!