Neutrino physics · Brussels → Cambridge, MA
I look for dark matter and new particle physics in the faint light neutrinos leave in Antarctic ice and Mediterranean water.
I’m a PhD student at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) as an F.R.S.-FNRS Aspirant, and a Fellow in the Harvard Department of Physics, supported by the Belgian American Educational Foundation. I work in the IceCube and KM3NeT collaborations, supervised by Juan Antonio Aguilar at ULB and Carlos Argüelles at Harvard.
I grew up in Brussels and studied in Manchester, Berlin and Paris, with a summer at CERN along the way. Away from the detectors I am learning the technical and policy sides of AI safety, I care about Europe’s future in science and technology, and I spend too much time digging for acid house and ambient trance records. I play piano and harp, speak French, English, German and some Japanese, and dive whenever I can.
Neutrinos barely interact, so they cross the Sun, the Earth and the universe almost untouched. That makes them a unique messenger for physics we cannot see any other way. I use two neutrino telescopes to listen.
Dark matter captured by the Sun can annihilate into neutrinos, the only particles able to escape its core. I co-led IceCube’s study of how well the newly deployed Upgrade can see this signal, showing leading sensitivity to some dark matter models with three years of data.
When a neutrino produces a charm quark, the detector can see two muon tracks instead of one. I am building a search for these dimuons in KM3NeT with likelihood and machine-learning reconstruction, and I set up an informal reconstruction forum where people working on event reconstruction across the detectors share methods and problems.
IceCube’s discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos was recognized by the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics.
I build 3D event displays so anyone can see what a neutrino interaction looks like inside a detector. Both are playing on their own below. Click one to take the controls, or open it full screen.
IceCube Collaboration (R. Abbasi et al.)
analysis co-leadarXiv:2605.06600IceCube Collaboration · 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference, Geneva
corresponding authorPoS(ICRC2025)486 · arXiv:2507.14943KM3NeT Collaboration · Nature 638, 376 (2025)
tau regenerationnature.comSince the Upgrade has only just been deployed, we couldn’t use real data yet and so we used detailed computer simulations of how the upgraded detector would perform.
Quoted in “Dark matter annihilation with the IceCube Upgrade”, IceCube Neutrino Observatory, 29 May 2026.
Fellow, learning the technical and policy sides of AI safety. Co-organizing the January 2027 treks to Washington DC and San Francisco.
Content co-chair for the European competitiveness pillar at the student-led conference at Harvard Kennedy School.
October 2026
I’m always happy to talk about science, outreach, or a calculation that could become a small paper.