Looking up

A few months ago, I wrote about becoming deputy-director of the SETE in Moulis next year, in a transient 2-years arrangement. Well, that situation escalated quickly ! After a few months acquainting myself more with the direction tasks, getting to know the nitty-gritty of the lab, and writing a detailed direction program, I received the green light from INEE last week to become full-director of the station as early as January 2027. And so now appears to be the perfect time to reflect on these three years period of “trying something new that makes sense to do as an eco-anxious academic appalled by what humans are making of the twenty-first century” — and to think about what comes next.

First of all, after a rather sluggish phase of learning and reading, and developing (due to my limited ~30% time until mid-2025, and lots of time spent on writing funding proposals rather than doing research), my new ecology research is going well, we have a few cool first papers in the pipeline with a CNRS colleague and with a PhD student that should come out later this year or next year (he recently gave a talk with preliminary results at the MPDEE conference in Leicester). I have also applied in spring to an original funding program (that is, not ERC or ANR) which I hope could help me grow my science garden and serve the broader science collective at SETE (essentially, ecological community dynamics and stability in space and time in both terrestrial and aquatic environments). Fingers crossed on that, as it would be a true game changer for my research activity (I am reasonably optimistic but it is highly competitive…). I have also participated in a few French conferences (French theoretical ecology RT and Michel Loreau’s career celebration conference) which enabled me to map the community better and get to know it and its people. So, the raw “research transition” mission in very much in progress and already a success in my view. I would not have bet on that when I decided to dip my toes into the field three years ago.

Now, none of the upcoming leadership responsabilities were anticipated or targeted at the time. The call for the direction job in Moulis last year came out as a surprise for me, and so did the support of colleagues there to apply. It took me three months to convince myself this was the right thing to do at this stage, and to commit to applying. The reasons I applied in the end are many, but three particularly stand out in the end, now that the dust has settled:

• I figured this was fully in line with my broader iniative to change things in my life and do things that make sense in view of my feelings about research, and the climate and ecological crises. What better opportunity is there, considering my research and management experience as former head of a big astro group, than to take the lead of a laboratory whose stated mission is “research on exciting new developments in theoretical and experimental ecology, in particular on biodiversity, ecosystems and the interactions between human societies with a view to contributing to their long-term sustainability ” ?
• We are highly specialized people in academia, and it is in no way clear whether our long-honed hyper-specialized skills can be useful beyond producing knowledge in the form of papers. This looked like an interesting opportunity to seize from this point of view too.

• I figured it would help to broaden my own professional life and interests beyond what I already do and know, and to counterbalance the lonely intellectual life of a theoretical scientist with a more “hands-on” job.

On top of the direction job, I am also going to take on the responsability of scientific coordinator of the SETE experimental plateforms. This is an extra load of work that I didn’t anticipate when I applied, but which came to feel like a natural commitment to make in recent months, as I got to know the station and its dynamics better. It is also yet another a human and methodological challenge for me, as I am going to have to become effective at experimental project management on a professional level (and under significant resources strain in the current budgetary landscape of French research), and to work with many people at the same time. All kinds of things a theoretical physicist is not necessarily well profiled for. But novelty and challenges are good, spending one’s life doing the same thing is boring and I am confident I can do this well too both in terms of human relationships and project efficiency. We’ll see. In any case, I don’t take this new responsability lightly either, and am preparing myself for it.

To cap this analysis, let me look back for a minute on the overall situation. Three years ago, I was at a psychological low and feeling in a career dead-end in astrophysics (despite producing what I think are probably the most significant astrophysics results of my career), and I had briefly looked for “hands-on” jobs completely outside of academia and CNRS, in Ariège. The outcome (of a lot of work and support from many people including readers of this post), three years later, seems like the achievement of a highly-desirable professional balance for me: 50% in fundamental research on exciting themes, 50% lab and international-level research platforms management, in a place and area I love, all of this with a deep sense of purpose that my professional life had come to lack. I am not one to get into self-congratulation, and I know the job comes with high expectations and that I will have to deliver. But, for the time being, objectively a lot has happened in my professional life in a very short amount of time (by standard academic timescales). I couldn’t have predicted most of it three years ago, but so far am glad I followed my intuitions and desires rather than clinging to my intellectually comfortable, but deeply emotionally and psychologically unsatisfying professional status quo and routines. And I should also say, as an often critical voice of CNRS and of the French research system, that I am extremely grateful to my employing institution and its people for making this kind of things possible. Feeling safe to attempt a career transition like this is probably one of the main benefits of working for CNRS.

So, the people at SETE and I are going to open a new, ambitious chapter for the station. Of course I feel like there are a lot of expectations locally and at the upper national echelon for me to deliver something new and fresh in this very special environment. Which brings me to the many new opportunities, and challenges that the new situation brings.

The broad programmatic vision I have is to develop new, ambitious science and outreach that resonates with today’s big research and societal challenges of ecology and environmental science, building on all the lab’s many current strengths: a collective culture and strong lab identity, strong human expertise, unique experimental facilities, outstanding research results and reputation in the field of ecology, a special geographic localization and a deep insertion into the local socio-economic territory (the station is the third employer overall of Saint-Girons’s area, it is a major source of local economic activity, and is the only CNRS research lab in Ariège).

In practice, this starts with foundational work and consolidating the lab’s “fundamentals” : providing a favorable human and technical environment for high-level fundamental theoretical and experimental research in ecology, making the best of the existing unique experimental facilities (including, but not exclusively the two terrestrial and aquatic metatrons) and making everyone at the station feel useful and well-considered, whatever their employement category. I would like the next five years to be first and foremost a big collective adventure rooted in people’s expertises, ideas and aspirations. This comes with many practical challenges however, considering the severe budget and staffing limitation of CNRS currently, and on many fronts I know that most of the time I am going to spend doing this job, like all CNRS direction jobs, is going to be to find ways to make the most of a bad situation.

But let’s dream a bit beyond the daily headache of having to deal with the paucity of resources and funding. SETE and its people are big “research instrument” and collective platform to try to do new things, so let’s seize the means of production ourselves and embrace the opportunity to do something good for the world. One thing that’s currently happening, after the nomination of Thierry Dauxois as head of CNRS is the planned fusion of CNRS national institutes. One of these fusions is more significant than others : it is the fusion of INSU (Universe sciences, including climate, oceanography, glaciology, continental surfaces etc.) and INEE (ecology and environment). Until now, astro was part of INSU and so I was part of INSU, and moving to SETE I was supposed to become part of INEE. So there is a bit of a silver lining for me to see this long-discussed fusion happening exactly as I am moving field, because I am switching from being at the sidelines of INSU’s research to being at the core of the new super-institution (which is going to be something like “Earth and Biosphere” — likely without astro !).

Why am I talking about this ? Well before the fusion already, part of my own research vision as a physicist and fluid dynamicist coming to an ecology lab was to build new interdisciplinary bridges between ecology and environmental physical sciences, notably because biological and ecological interactions with their abiotic environment (terrestrial and aquatic) remains one of the weakest spots of current IPCC efforts to understand our climate, ocean and the consequences of global warming (think modelling the effects and roots of wildfires, biosphere and biodiversity resilience, the effect of biological diseases or acidification of oceans on ecosystem functions such as CO2 intake). Conversely, still very little is understood on ecological resilience in a changing climate and anthropogenically shaped world, and so it is a two-way bridge that needs to be built in a game of egg and chicken feedbacks between ecology and physics. And as a physicist and numericist coming from INSU, with a lot of connections with people working in environmental physical sciences, mathematicians and computer scientists, I hope I can bring a lot on this front. So that will be one theme of expansion, very likely in connection with conservation science and conservation policy too.

There’s another key interdisciplinary bridge to develop with social scientists locally and beyond, to understand and help to shape the future of a) human perception of nature and b) the perception and reaction to environmental science. All of this can be researched at an individual, and local level, and scale up to societal and political levels through interactions and collaborative work with non-academic actors, including environmental associations, elected people, and agricultural, economic and industrial actors. All of this too remains very much work in progress at IPCC and elsewhere.

Finally, beyond social sciences research itself, we are going to build on the many existing local initiatives to build a significant effort to reach out to the local populations at a grassroot science and education level, to open our research and infrastructure for visits, to organize public conferences and round tables by inviting people working in ecology and environmental questions as well as people of all stripes and areas from the non-academic world, to talk with local officials and elected people up to the national level. What I aim at is to leverage the immersion of SETE in a local socio-economic territory, right at the core of ecology’s matter of study in the Pyrénées, to find new grassroot ways to connect science, research and society, to reconnect the academic ivory tower to people as much as we can, and perhaps to find new ways ourselves to do science, to think about scientific research and its objectives, and to generate new epistemology. That’s the rough idea at least. Here too, we’ll see how this plays out in practice, but I am very enthusiastic that we are in a very good position at SETE to develop this kind of things, as the local scene and environment appears to be uniquely fertile for such “experiments”.

What could happen ? A lot of good things, hopefully, and right now I of course have a very positive outlook on the whole thing (hence the title of this post) and embrace this new adventure with all my heart and professional willpower, although of course I have my own doubts and know my own limitations, as well as the system’s and SETE’s own problems.

But It could all go wrong too, for a variety of reasons. Maybe the main threat on a short-term, is the political situation in France with a presidential election looming next year. While CNRS is trying to reform itself and adjust to this century’s new challenges and difficulties for research and for us scientists, we do not know where power will be heading in France in 2027. And, judging by what is happening in the USA at the moment, the outcome of our own presidential election next year could be a death sentence for environmental sciences and ecology. What will happen if the funding for environmental science, and social sciences, the two pillars of the collective research vision of SETE, are purely and simply shutdown ? That’s the stuff of my professional nightmares. Me and my colleagues at SETE will do everything we can to do good research and outreach that serves our society and a peaceful, long-term sustainable cohabitation with the rest of the living world. It is going to be your voting job, French readers, to make sure this remains possible in France after May 2027. Meanwhile, let’s commit fully to this new adventure !