Previous Members

Holder of a master's degree in physics, Silvia obtained her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the University of Siena (Italy) in 2014. During her Ph.D., she developed computational pipelines dedicated to the study of the bacterial transcriptome from high density chip experiments. From October 2014 to December 2018, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mediterranean Center for Molecular Medicine (Inserm U1065) in Nice to study the regulation of gene expression mediated by miRNAs. Her main areas of expertise concern high throughput sequencing data analysis including OMICS technologies such as RNA-seq, CLIP-seq, ChIP-seq and the development of bioinformatic pipelines.
From January 2019 until August 2023, Silvia joined the MSI as operational director of the former Medical Data Lab.

After a master's degree in applied mathematics (Université Paris Diderot), Marco Corneli earned his Ph. D. in statistics at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2017. His thesis focused on the analysis of dynamic random graphs, in terms of vertex clustering and detection of multiple breaks.

At the J. A. Dieudonné Laboratory, he later undertook post-doctoral research on the unsupervised classification of mixed data such as graphs, ordinal data, texts and images. Since 2017, he has also been teaching a course on statistical inference in the framework of the Université Côte d’Azur’s Master in Data Science. Author of several articles published in international scientific journals, he has developed two R packages and contributed to the programming of C++ software for the co-clustering of mixed data, for which a patent has been submitted.
From September 2019 until August 2022, Marco Corneli joined the MSI as engineer and operational director of the former Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLab), an MSI center of expertise that was dedicated to machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in Digital Humanities.

 Theodora Karvouniari obtained a Ph.D. from Inria Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée in collaboration with Vision Institute (Paris) with a thesis on Retinal Waves: theory, numerics, experiments. She was recruited as a Postdoctoral researcher (November 2018-2019) at the MSI in order to carry out the 3DNRA project successfully, under Elisabeth Pécou’s supervision.

Djampa Kozlowski holds a master's and a doctorate in bioinformatics from Université Côte d'Azur. His thesis work, carried out at INRAe, focuses on the study of crop pests and their adaptability through the analysis of multi-omic data. Djampa then completed a post-doctorate course on similar themes before training in Artificial Intelligence. Djampa specializes in multi-omic data processing and molecular evolution.
From November 2021 until October 2023, Djampa joined the MSI as an "Operational Engineer in Multi-omic Data Integration and Artificial Intelligence" as part of a bilateral project between Université Côte d'Azur and INRAe. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence, this project aims to study interactions between organisms in the context of plant health.

Dr. Lesage’s overarching scientific expertise lies in the experimental and computational analysis of thermal energy systems. Since receiving his Master’s in Mathematics from the Université de Montréal and his doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from McMaster University, he has lead research groups investigating topical heat transfer problems relating to industry energy conversion needs.

At the MSI, he worked on the analysis of the superheated photoelectric effect, the modeling of energy transport systems for multi-phase heat exchangers, the optimisation of solar thermoelectric energy conversion, the modeling of liquid-to-liquid thermoelectric generators, and the accurate measurement of thermal diffusivity in building materials.

Dr. Lesage has experience as an Adjunct Professor at McMaster University, and as an Associate Professor at the Université du Québec. From July 2017 until July 2018, he had been a lead researcher at the Center for Modeling, Simulations and Interactions (MSI) at Université Côte d’Azur in France

Jean-Noël Mattei holds a master’s degree in Mathematical Engineering, Stochastic and Statistic Modeling, from Université Côte d'Azur.

From October 2019 until July 2022, Jean-Noël joined the MSI to work on the project Regional expertise alignment and firm performance, one of the pilot projects of the MSI former Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab).

Ryan McMinds earned his PhD in Microbiology in 2018 at Oregon State University. He conducted his dissertation research on the distribution of microbial symbionts in scleractinian corals and participated in the Global Coral Microbiome Project and the Tara Pacific Expedition. He has experience in coral taxonomy, high-throughput genetic sequencing, phylogenetics, community data analysis, and Bayesian modeling.

From February 2019 until September 2020, Ryan McMinds joined the MSI in support of the project "Processing and analysis of the complex datasets from the TaraPacific expedition," led by the Institute of Research on Cancer and Aging in Nice (IRCAN, Pasteur medical campus) as part of the Tara-Pacific expedition and its collaboration with the Tara Foundation.

For further information, cf: Ryan McMinds: an MSI engineer supporting the Tara-Pacific expedition.

Elisabeth Pécou obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in 1996 and completed her habilitation to supervise research (HDR) at the University of Burgundy in 2005.

Initially having studied the topological properties of low-dimensional dynamical systems, she has devoted her research over the past fifteen years to biological modeling and simulation, mainly for the understanding of regulation dynamics at intra- and intercellular levels and dysfunction mechanisms linked to pathologies.

Elisabeth Pécou has been a professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis since 2006, and undertook research in an industrial context for eight years: first in a start-up (SOBIOS), then in an international software company (Dassault Systèmes), where she led a research team dedicated to the development of methods and algorithms for modeling and simulation for the life sciences industry.

She resumed her professorial post in April 2018.

Holder of a Master's degree in Bioinformatics from Université Côte d'Azur, obtained in 2017, David Pratella was recruited as a bioinformatics engineer at the MSI in order to optimize and implement new analysis pipelines in the context of NGS data studies.

From September 2017 until August 2018, Charlotte Sakarovitch joined the Center of Modeling, Simulation and Interactions where she developed applications in the medical field related to the MSI.

Holder of a Master's degree in Statistical Econometrics  (TIDE) obtained at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1) in 2018, Fanny Simões was recruited as a biostatistician engineer at the MSI to study the link between exposure to air pollutants and the frequency of cardiac dyspnea in the SUD - Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur Region, through the reconciliation of a "patient" database and an air pollutant database.