Alex was initially trained as a 'French engineer' with a specialisation in Applied Statistics in Rennes. He obtained a CEA PhD scholarship to work on metabolic networks and prokaryote comparative genomics, devising a method to search for candidate genes for sequence-orphan enzymatic activities, as well as integrating evolutionary relationships to inform a high-throughput exploration of the enzymatic activities of a newly-discovered protein family.

He followed his wife to New Zealand, where he worked as a biostatistics postdoc for the Sleep/Wake Research Center, before being recruited by the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research to initiate a bioinformatics workforce there, with as a main project the analysis of RNA-seq data from mouse dendritic cells stimulated with parasite material. A third postdoctoral position — this time in Switzerland — saw Alex seeking to identify long intergenic non-coding RNAs involved in driving or maintaining the cell cycle by exploring publicly-available single-cell data of staged mESCs. Alex has again crossed the world and has taken a position at the Baker Institute in Melbourne, where he is working with both the Meikle and Inouye labs on integrating lipidomics and GWAS data.

Alex loves to tinker in R and gnaw at datasets until he can get everything out of them, and enjoys helping people out with their experimental designs and statistical analyses.