Im a French astrophysicist working as a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow (FLF) at Durham University in the United Kingdom. I spend most of my time trying to understand what Dark Matter is. The only thing we know about it is that it represents 80% of the total amount of matter in the Universe, but has remained directly invisible to astronomers and particle physicists so far.

However we can see it indirectly via an effect called gravitational lensing — the bending of the light emitted by a distant object as it goes passed a foreground one. The highest concentrations of dark matter in our Universe are found in the most massive objects we can observe: clusters of galaxies. With my work I am most interested by the most massive of these galaxy clusters that I like to call ‘Cosmic Beasts’.

Combining observations of gravitational lensing in Cosmic Beasts with the famous Hubble Space Telescope and with other ground-based telescopes such as the SALT in South Africa or the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, I can see where their dark matter is, and how these clusters evolve. That gives me clues to investigate more generally what dark matter is made of !

I first visited Mauritius almost 15 years ago as some of my family moved there. Since then I have been coming back every year to visit them, and started doing some outreach locally during the annular eclipse back in 2016. I really enjoy interactions with kids and youth more generally as they are usually bias-free and have absolutely no filter ! It makes every interactions completely different from each other and I love that unpredictable side ! I had the chance to do such interventions in Mauritius several times by visiting several primary schools, the last ones being in May 2019.