Instead of a rope stretched between animal and superman, as Nietzsche stated, Mathieu is a rope stretched between chemistry and engineering. Halfway between the lab and the office. For several years, he has been jumping from one discipline to another, trying to bring them together.
Mathieu was born in the city of Cortázar’s Rayuela, in the stage where the Before Sunset main characters fall in love. The city “tossed by the waves but never sunk”. When he was barely 20, he left Paris to go to Marseille, where he studied engineering, the equivalent of a Master’s degree in engineering at the École Centrale de Marseille.
For his fifth year of higher education, and during his final course, he joined the Université Paul Cézanne, also in Marseille, where he studied a Research Master’s degree in Chemistry, specifically in analytical and theoretical chemistry. He finished his master’s degree thesis at the University of Nottingham, where he spent six months, coping with the magnetic resonance, his Master thesis topic.
Mathieu is now back in his hometown. He is a research engineer at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, which is among the world’s leading research institutions. However, it is not the first large organization, characterised by reference in the world of research and development, where Mathieu had worked.
In 2011, after his stay in Nottingham, Mathieu got a Marie Curie Fellowship, and he became a CERNie. He worked there for three years as a fellow, and an extra one, associated with CERN, as a physicist in radiation protection. From this to intervention planning and optimization algorithms. He was one researcher orchestra.
Taking this more literally, he was always accompanied by music. At the 60th CERN Anniversary, Domenico Vicinanza composed a melody based on the scientific data collected by the four main LHC experiments. Mathieu was part of that musical score, playing the harp in the CERN Control Centre.
From the city of love, Mathieu misses the CERN environment. On the one hand, the one arounds it: the bright green landscapes, Geneva’s lake, the sugar mountains and the sunsets that dye the Mont Blanc purple. On the other hand, the CERN’s own atmosphere, full of interesting conversations, great colleagues and with no worries about money and aid. In Mathieu’s case, whenever he needed something, he could just ask for it and he would get the resources with which to continue learning.
Outside the lab, Mathieu keeps working. He is currently working on his dreams, which are very concrete: continue building his family and continue doing research. He would like his daughter to grow up in a nice and peaceful environment, where she can actually work and do something she likes. Also, he would love to go on putting together his engineering background and the chemical research: to lead them, to get his results and not to have any funding problems, because research is an investment, not an expense.
Marie Curie once said that “we must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained”. And, certainly, Mathieu has that trust and personal commitment.