I have been working as a geophysicist researcher for CNRS at the Geoazur Institute located in the Sophia-Antipolis technopole since 1998. My professional interests are numerical modeling of seismic wave propagation in the Earth and seismic imaging of the Earth interior at different spatial scales by Full Waveform Inversion (FWI). FWI has been originally developed by Pr. A. Tarantola in the eighties and has been the subject of renewed interest since one decade as the computational power of supercomputer increased, multi-azimuth long-offset seismic surveys were designed by the oil industry and dense networks of broadband seismometers were deployed by the earthquake seismology community. FWI is a nonlinear (local) optimization problem that aims to estimate physical properties of the subsurface from seismic data collected near the surface by minimizing themisfit between the recorded data and the modeled one. The corresponding forward problem consists of solving the (elastodynamic) wave equation under some physical approximation (acoustic versus elastic, isotropic versus anisotropic, non attenuating versus attenuating, ...).

 

I initially performed engineering studies at ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers)  before evolving toward Earth sciences during my PhD, devoted to the study of the deep crustal structure of the Kerguelen plateau (Indian ocean). After two post-doctoral positions at the Institute for Geophysics of the University of Texas in Austin and at the Institute for Geophysics of Paris school of Mines, I started implementing and assessing with various case studies frequency-domain full-waveform modeling and inversion. After several years of computer development and assessment of FWI with a first achievement in 2004 on the Baragiano dataset in the southern Appenines (PhD C. Ravaut), I launched with Pr. J. Virieux the SEISCOPE project in 2006. This project, which is funded by a consortium of petroleum companies, is devoted to the developement and application of the FWI technology in exploration geophysics.

 

I am also interested in the adaptation of FWI to natural sources (earthquake seismology) to develop high-resolution lithospheric models from distance earthquakes (teleseisms). This research is currently performed at Geoazur by  S. Beller (PhD student) in collaboration with V. Monteiller (now at LMA).

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I am currently working on the development of the 3D frequency-domain FWI code FFWI based on the MUMPS multifrontal direct solver in collaboration with A. Miniussi (OCA). With the FFWI code, I performed the first application of this frequency-domain FWI technology to a real industrial OBC dataset from the Valhall oil field, offshore Norway.

 

You will find in this web page a description of my research activity, my publications, my CV, some lecture notes, a collection of sample codes to learn about seismic modeling and FWI and some pictures of my cycling activity.