Team
Current team
Mohammadi, Hesaneh
02/2025-present, supervised by Stéphanie Durand and me, on localised tomography of Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji is a dormant volcano that has not attracted enough attention, and we do not know it well enough. In Hesaneh’s PhD — she is very motivated — we are developing a localised seismic imaging method on the new platform flexOPT.jl, and from the resulting model we would like to image fluid migration.
Drique, Lorette
12/2024–present: Project supervised by Béatrice Puyssegur at CEA, Manon Dalaison at IPGP, and myself, focusing on the mitigation of errors in InSAR images in the presence of vegetation. Lorette developed her own project and came to propose that we work on it together. I am discovering a new field, even though I remain “Monsieur HDR”. I hope that, at some point, we will be able to analyse data from Mount Fuji.
Goos, Isabel
04/2023-present, supervised by Véronique Van Elewyck and me on neutrino oscillation tomography. Together with the University of Idaho group and Stéphanie Durand in Lyon, Isabel drives our collaborative work. It is the only team in the world that quantitatively bridges high-energy physics and geophysics.
Alumni
Borde, Timothée
02/2026-06/2026, M2, supervised by Léonard Seydoux, Lise Retailleu and me myself on the characterisation of continous data of Mount Fuji.
Riché, Floriane
11/2025-04/2026, L2, an internship reviewing studies on Mount Fuji. She has the courage to dive into publications from many fields — geochemistry, volcanology, petrology — to write a synthesis.
Lucas, Mahé
11/2025–06/2026: Supervised personal initiative project, carried out as an internship focused on calculating neutrino oscillograms in the presence of water in the mantle. We used the model of Takashi Nakagawa and Paul Tackley to compute the electron number density and integrated functions developed in flexOPT.jl.
Lamy, Baptiste
11/2025–06/2026: Supervised personal initiative project, carried out as an internship focused on calculating neutrino oscillograms in the presence of water in the mantle. We used the model of Takashi Nakagawa and Paul Tackley to compute the electron number density and integrated functions developed in flexOPT.jl.
Salomé, Estelle
06/2025-08/2025, second year at the École nationale supérieure de géologie, Nancy, supervised by Véronique Van Elewyck and me. Estelle adapted Neurthino.jl into my new platform flexOPT.jl to make it possible to compute neutrino oscillograms for heterogeneous 2D/3D Earth models.
Hua, Haiyuan
02/2025-08/2025, M2R, supervised by Taichi Kawamura and me, to explore inversion methodologies for 1D models of the lunar structure from array data. Haiyuan has been hired as a research engineer at an oil company in China.
Delaroque, Lorraine
02/2023-06/2023, M2R. Lorraine came from Université Grenoble Alpes and developed a Python portal to download data and compute synthetic seismograms with dsmpy. Lorraine is now a PhD student in planetary science with Antoine Lucas and Taichi Kawamura.
Bawa, Neha
02/2023-06/2023, M2, supervised with Ssu-Ting Lai. The project was to extension of our code of Fréchet derivatives for a cylidrical sample for S-wave velocity.
Pestes, Rebekah
11/2022-04/2024, supervised by Véronique Van Elewyck and me. Rebekah defended her PhD at Virginia Tech before a jury that included Shunsaku Horiuchi, an old friend in quantum physics. It was the first time I worked on high-energy physics, and I learned a lot thanks to her.
Teagai, Kapiolani
PhD student 12/2021-09/2025, supervised by John Armitage, Christophe Andermann, Niels Hovius and me. Kapiolani arrived in Paris in 2021 after her M2 in hydrology. We simulated the seasonal change in apparent seismic velocity from modelling of water transport. Thanks to Kapiolani, I could do fieldwork in Nepal with the dream team.
Zhu, Qiwen
11/2023-, supervised by Li Zhao in Beijing and me on tomography of the Tibetan Plateau. Qiwen returned to China in February 2025.
Saläun, Charlotte
06/2020-07/2020, third year at the École nationale supérieure de géologie, Nancy. She arrived in the middle of the pandemic and we only met in person a few times. Still, together with my colleagues Kurama Okubo and Eiji Yamada, we communicated every day and analysed urban seismic noise before and during the worldwide lockdowns, comparing it with mobility data provided by Google to find a link with the distance between the seismometer and the city centre. The internship went really well. Unfortunately, a paper was published in Science (Lecocq et al. 2020), so we have to focus our interpretation on the economy to submit a different paper on the same topic.
Asnar, Manuel
06/2020-12/2020, M2, École nationale supérieure de techniques avancées (ENSTA Paris). During the covid, he was revisiting the high-order Born series for spherical harmonics to explore the possibility of extending the DSM1D software for a 3D globe model. Diving into the (nasty) mathematics and my (spaghetti) code, he was able to show properly the limitations of the methodology, which is now one of my motivations to reform flexOPT.jl. He is now a PhD student in GFZ Potsdam.
Chauvet, Roxane
06/2019-07/2019, L3, Geological Engineering (CMIgéoc) from University of Bordeaux. Roxane was very enthusiastic during this short internship, in which we improved the toolbox to invert data for the InSight project. I gave her a set of synthetic data computed for Mars models in order to locate marsquakes. We realised that the inverse of the Hessian matrix has to be used to stabilise the solution. Roxane and I wrote everything in Python, and these tools are still used in the tutorials of my “Inverse Problem” course. They were then integrated into my Fortran code “MarsMTInversion”, which became the engine of Alice Jacob’s PhD thesis. After this internship, Roxane joined the Master’s programme at IPGP.
Xiao, Zhu
08/2018-06/2019, PhD, partly supervised by Yuan Gao of the China Earthquake Administration (CEA) and Takashi Iidaka of ERI, University of Tokyo. Zhu spent a few months at ERI with Takashi in summer 2018, at the same time as me, and wanted to explore the upper mantle beneath the Tibetan Plateau. We met twice a week to discuss the inverse problem and the famous Occam’s razor. He is very good at visualising results and we could advance the project at an impressive speed. We published a paper on this imaging using waveform inversion. Zhu is now a postdoc in China.
Dill, Jane
06/2018-11/2018, M2, École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs (fine arts), supervised by Davide Napoli and me. Jennifer wanted to write a thesis and build a workshop around the theme “Line, Wave and Movement… raw materials of creation”, whose first chapter, “At the heart of the Earth”, tried to let people listen to seismic motions and see waveforms live with geophones. We discussed a lot about how to connect art and science in general and worked together to set up the workshop. I ended up playing the bassoon to make the geophones vibrate during her defence. I do not often supervise a fine-arts student, but the first sentence of her thesis was a little gift for me: “This installation is the fruit of an encounter between an abstract artist and a music-loving scientist.” She graduated with highest honours.
Loubet, Antonin
02/2018-06/2018, M2R, supervised by Philippe Lognonné and me. Antonin contributed to computing synthetic seismograms for Mars models with the Direct Solution Method (DSM). He is now a senior civil servant.
Lai, Ssu-Ting
02/2018-06/2018, M2 GPX, supervised by me and Ikuo Katayama at Hiroshima University, then PhD 10/2018-04/2022 supervised by me, Alexandre Schubnel, Fabian Bonilla and Yann Capdeville. Ssu-Ting visited IES, Academia Sinica, during my stay in Taiwan in 2017. From the start I felt her energy and passion. She came to IPGP as a GPX student and I proposed a subject on time-lapse imaging of rock deformation. The subject came to me by chance, during a conversation at the drinks of the “Geller Fest” workshop held in Tokyo in June 2017 to celebrate the retirement of my mentor Bob: Ikuo showed me the waveforms recorded by a sensor on a rock during deformation, saying: “Look at these, they’re really beautiful, aren’t they? I know nothing about seismology, but I think you could model these waveforms, which would be completely new in our field!” It was a high-risk project, yet I liked it very much. First, I proposed to model them with my code “OptimallyAccurate2D” to understand the essential physics. After the six-month M2 internship with Ssu-Ting, which ended with an EAGE paper, we decided to continue the modelling with the spectral-element method. I obtained a MOPGA (Make Our Planet Great Again) grant to fund this PhD. She defended as my first official PhD student. She did her postdoc at GFZ Potsdam and has been a researcher (chargée de recherche) at Université Gustave Eiffel since December 2025. She was also the flautist of the PhiloGaïa Orchestra.
Jacob, Alice
03/2017-09/2017, M2R, UPMC, supervised by Philippe Lognonné and me; then another M2R at IPGP, 02/2018-06/2018, supervised by Clément Perrin, Antoine Lucas, Sébastien Rodriguez, Philippe Lognonné and me; then PhD 10/2018-04/2022 supervised by Matthieu Plasman, Clément Perrin, Philippe Lognonné, Zongbo Xu, Antoine Lucas, Sébastien Rodriguez and me. Alice is passionate about planetary science. Before InSight landed, we computed high-frequency synthetic seismograms with the Direct Solution Method (DSM) for several geological scenarios of Mars, predicting the complexity caused by a regolith layer at the surface of the red planet. During Alice’s thesis, I wrote the code “MarsMTInversion”, which uses a database of Green’s functions computed by “DSM Kernel Suite” to locate marsquakes recorded by a single station and estimate their focal mechanisms. This code is the engine of Alice’s thesis. Alice then looked very carefully at the seismic data, considering both their frequency content and the absence of surface waves, and interpreted her results with her geological analysis based on the topography of Cerberus Fossae.
Robin, Aline
10/2016-02/2021, PhD, supervised by Satish Singh. She needed to speed up the computation of the gradient direction in waveform inversion and came to me to formalise the representation theorem for this specific case. Aline taught tutorials in my seismology course and actively took part in writing the lecture notes open to all students. She works at OPeRA (Organisme Pétrolier de Recherche Appliquée), a research organisation in seismic imaging for the oil industry, born from a partnership between ADERA, TOTAL and UPPA (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour).
Jang, Hyoihn
07/2016-08/2016, M2R, Seoul National University, supervised by YoungHee Kim and me. Following the bi-national workshop I organised with Sang-Mook Lee, we identified a few research directions, one of which was seismic imaging of the mantle beneath the Caroline plate. The challenge was to find a robust way to image the region of interest, since there are neither large earthquakes nor seismic stations (the plate is entirely covered by the Pacific). I suggested looking at the differential travel times between the S phase, which does not sample the region, and the SS phase, which reflects there. Hyoihn was extremely efficient during her short stay in Paris, which allowed us to present the first image at AGU 2016. We kept working together to refine the image and the interpretation: unfortunately it took much longer than expected, but we finally published the first paper on it. Hyoihn now works at an IT company in Korea.
Rahi, Kenza
06/2019-07/2019, L2, supervised by me. Kenza is a very enthusiastic student. She wanted to do this internship with me even though an internship in the second year of a bachelor is not common. She worked with Roxane on “MarsMTInversion”.
Franken, Thijs
02/2016-09/2016, M2R, supervised by me, then PhD 10/2016-12/2019, supervised by John Armitage, Alexandre Fournier and me. He came as an intern from Utrecht University to my lab right in the middle of the development of the code “OptimallyAccurate2D” (e.g. Geller & Takeuchi 1998; Fuji et al. 2016). Although the basis of the theory was established, it was written nowhere how to derive the coefficients. With Thijs, we reworked the formulation. Thijs then started his PhD on the seismological filtering of geodynamic models with John and Alex. He spent a year modelling melt transport beneath hotspots, and then studied wave propagation in these geodynamically consistent models. At the end of his thesis, we compared these synthetic data with data observed at La Réunion (a single station) and could point to high extraction of partial melt beneath the region. As this subject is very close to my heart, this study is the starting point of my future work. Thijs has just started working at Fugro.
Santty Dalinaud, Guy
01/2016-06/2016, M2R GPX, supervised by Hervé Chauris and me. The internship aimed to quantify the effect of errors in the forward operators on the final images of waveform inversions. As Guy was not often in the lab, the project did not progress well. However, I worked on this subject later and gave a presentation at EGU in 2018.
Cuvilliez, Clémence
07/2015-09/2015, third year at the École nationale supérieure de géologie, Nancy. Arriving right after Oleg’s internship, Clémence took over his finite-difference optimal-operator code. She cleaned up the code and wrote an EAGE proceeding with me during the internship. As she is a guitarist, Matthias, Clémence and I gave a few small street concerts in Paris. She became a geophysicist at TotalEnergies.
Tannoury, Claude
01/2015-06/2015, M2R, supervised by Éléonore Stutzmann, Jean-Paul Montagner and me. We wanted to extract Green’s functions from cross-correlations of seismic noise recorded in Greenland. Claude, a serious student, worked a lot with Éléonore, but time ran out and we could not model synthetic seismograms. On the other hand, we exchanged a lot during her internship and she deepened her understanding of theoretical seismology. After a PhD in physics in Rennes, she now teaches at Efrei Paris, the “Grande École du numérique”.
Ovcharenko, Oleg
01/2015-06/2015, M2R GPX, supervised by Roland Martin and me. We developed a finite-difference code, “OptimallyAccurate2D”, with discontinuities that do not coincide with the grid. This study was published a year later and the code is still available on my GitHub. Oleg got the best mark at his Master’s defence. He then started a PhD at KAUST and is now a data scientist at ExxonMobil.
Jiang, Hao
01/2015-06/2015, M2R, supervised by Hervé Chauris and me. Very motivated and strong in physics, Hao worked on time-lapse seismic migration. His results helped us understand the issues, especially for the localised waveform inversion that Shihao Yuan and I developed over time. Hao continued working on the subject in the presence of a highly attenuating layer with Hervé and defended his PhD in 2019. He currently works at CGG.
Yuan, Shihao
10/2014-04/2018, PhD, supervised by Satish Singh and me. I had known Shihao since his M2 at IPGP. He joined the marine geosciences team and started developing localised time-lapse waveform inversion. We spent a whole year (re)formulating the representation theorem for a small perturbation, which could finally be interpreted as a perturbation theory. Even though I had experience with this kind of theory, it was with Shihao that I could theoretically connect many existing techniques in theoretical and numerical seismology (the appendix of our first paper is still one of the works I am most proud of). With Dmitry and Satish, we advanced the methodology, and I plan to use the code we put together to image magma chambers with Milena, who joined IPGP in September 2021. As Shihao has always been interested in rotational seismology, he did his postdoc with Heiner Igel in Munich, taking part in several projects around this new technology. He is now a professor (CPJ) at Université Gustave Eiffel.
Marjanović, Milena
09/2014-06/2020, postdoc, supervised by Satish Singh and me. Milena had finished her PhD at Columbia University in 2013 and was in Toulouse for her sabbatical year. Thanks to Satish Singh and Michel Rabinowicz of the Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, I had the chance to discuss with her. We agreed that I would invite her with my research quality bonus (BQR) for incoming researchers, and she then obtained a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship with Satish Singh and me. From 2014 to 2017 we worked on 2D waveform inversion of the East Pacific Rise. We showed that finite-frequency tomography was sufficient and robust to image the existence of the magma chamber, whereas waveform inversion was needed to detail the behaviour of hydrothermal circulation. What we forget with our physicists’ minds, especially in geosciences, is Occam’s razor. During our studies, we obtained very complex models after high-frequency waveform inversion and thought a lot about this problem during the interpretation. We published a paper on it and we want to restart the project using the localised waveform inversion method developed in my lab with Shihao Yuan during his PhD and postdoc. Since April 2021, Milena has been a CNRS researcher at IPGP.
Konishi, Kensuke
09/2014-07/2020, postdoc, supervised by me together with Frédéric Deschamps at the Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Kensuke joined the lab of Robert (Bob) J. Geller at the University of Tokyo in 2006 as a fourth-year undergraduate, one year after me. We have always worked closely together, until 2020 when he decided to leave research. He defended his PhD in Tokyo in 2013 and then spent a year in Sang-Mook Lee’s lab at Seoul National University. Being extremely skilled in computing, Kensuke helped me a lot to refine my codes, especially my waveform inversion codes. All the numerical tools I had initially developed during my PhD were cleaned up during his. They are still used by students in Bob Geller’s lab and, later, in Kenji Kawai’s lab. Kensuke contacted me when he wanted to leave Seoul in spring 2014. I was then discussing a new joint project with Frédéric Deschamps (IES, Academia Sinica), who visited me in Paris, on reconciling geodynamics and seismology (which has interested me since the beginning of my career), so I asked him whether he would hire Kensuke and co-supervise him with me for a few years. His answer was a big “yes”. This was the beginning of our French-Taiwanese collaboration, which still continues. With Kensuke and Frédéric, we first applied my methodology of simultaneous waveform inversion for elasticity and anelasticity to image the base of the mantle beneath the Caroline plate. We published three papers on this subject, and he also took part in another project with Kei Hasegawa, a postdoc with Li Zhao at IES, Academia Sinica, which optimised spectral-element operators without increasing the computational cost. He came to IPGP twice for long stays: i) December 2014, to implement my attenuation inversion code in Java (funded by Academia Sinica); and ii) May-June 2018, to create the prototype of a new Direct Solution Method (DSM) code for a 3D planet using spherical harmonics (funded by IPGP). We were supposed to finish this project during his third visit in spring 2020 (I had obtained a one-month visiting researcher position), but the pandemic prevented us; the code is still under development, despite some contributions by Manuel Asnar over six months in 2020. Kensuke returned to Japan in August 2020 to start his new job as a software engineer.
Oshikiri, Takamasa
06/2014-02/2015, fourth-year undergraduate, Osaka University, supervised by Hidetoshi Shimodaira and me. At the eighth Japanese-French Frontiers of Science symposium (JFFoS), I had the chance to meet Hidetoshi, a famous statistician, who suggested that I co-supervise a fourth-year internship (in Japan, the bachelor lasts four years). With Takamasa, we looked at the Hessian matrix used in waveform inversion in order to find a better way to precondition the inversion. From a statistician’s point of view, the rank of the matrix is extremely low in seismology, which destabilises the inverse problem. Even if this was not a new observation, this report is unforgettable, because since then I pay much more attention whenever I propose to invert seismological data.
Villanueva-Robles, Fernando
01/2014-06/2014, M2R GPX, then 10/2014-08/2015, start of a PhD funded by CGG Mexico, supervised by Nikolaï Shapiro and me. The aim was to propose a methodology for wavefield extrapolation from marine active-source data. With his drive, Fernando published two EAGE papers with us on this project within a year. It laid a very good foundation for Shihao’s thesis, as I learned a lot about representation theorems. During the economic crisis at his company, he unfortunately had to change his PhD subject.
El Sanharawi, Moustapha
11/2013-01/2014, post-master, supervised by Satish Singh and me. Coming from Télécom Paris, Moustapha cleaned up the code for seismic wavefield extrapolation in an acoustic medium. Applying this tool to the Sumatra data, I realised the limits of the methodology, which later led me to develop an extrapolation code using full Green’s functions with Shihao Yuan. Moustapha is now an IT consultant.
Jaegler, Hugo
06/2013-07/2013, third year, EOST Strasbourg. Despite the short internship, Hugo impressed me a lot. Coming from EOST, he wanted to help me finish my code “DSM Kernel Suite”. He added useful Python tools for visualisation, which are still used today. Hugo is now a research engineer at the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, in a radiochemistry and analytical chemistry lab.
Juhel, Kévin
03/2013-06/2013, M1, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, supervised by Lapo Boschi, Laëtitia Le Pourhiet and me at UPMC. Coming from the physics department, he worked on the resolution of surface waves. We tested seismic interferometry with synthetic data. He then did his PhD with Jean-Paul Montagner and Martin Vallée on prompt elasto-gravity signals related to large earthquakes. He is a postdoc in Nantes.
Egorova, Angelina
01/2013-06/2013, M2R, supervised by Satish Singh and me. Angelina was in the first class of GPX (Master 2 in exploration geophysics) and was therefore officially my first M2 intern. The project aimed to explore the internal structure of the fracture zone beneath the Ninety East Ridge. Unfortunately, we had to abandon this internship.
Belahi, Thomas
10/2012–04/2017, PhD, supervised by Satish Singh and me. My very first PhD student working on the viscoelastic waveform inversion. We even spent one week in Ariège one summer, which I could call as the precursor of CLEEDI workshops. Very curious about everything, he was the one, together with Matthias Meschede, to bring Github culture to IPGP. When I look back now and recall of him suggesting to work in Julia, of which I am now enthousiastic. Thomas is now working as a data science consultant in Paris.
Meschede, Matthias
11/2011-06/2015, PhD, supervised by Barbara Romanowicz; 07/2015-12/2017, postdoc, supervised by Éléonore Stutzmann. I was never officially his supervisor, but he worked with me on the sixth chapter of his thesis on the Born approximation and the influence of scattering on seismological data. This experiment became one of the axes of Ssu-Ting’s thesis, and Matthias co-authors the second paper we are preparing. To examine the effects of random heterogeneities on waveforms in global seismology, Matthias contributed a lot to improving my code “DSM Kernel Suite”. His contribution to the life of researchers and students at the institute must not be forgotten: he organised workshops and French language classes to support mental health, especially of students. He was the first member of the IPGP orchestra (now the PhiloGaïa Orchestra), which I initiated, and we also wrote a paper together on this subject. He works as a manager at a Paris-based software company (Tweag). With Milena and John, he organised a geophysics hackathon at IPGP (for the first time in 2019).
Borisov, Dmitry
11/2010-11/2014, PhD, supervised by Satish Singh. I arrived at IPGP when he was at the end of the second year and he was working for the wavefield injection method in Cartesian box. Since it was one of my postdoc projects in Toulouse, it was natural to work with him and Dmitry helped the first year Shihao’s PhD thesis later on. He is now a research professor at Kansas Geological Survey.