With decades of experience in Life Sciences and Digital fields and a scientific background in molecular biology and immunovirology (PhD from the Pasteur Institute, France), he first got to grips with bioinformatics tools and code in the early 90s whilst working on viral phylogenetic studies. After his PhD, he joined the effort at Genoscope (Evry, France) in ramping up the human genome project, putting in place the automatic gene annotation system for human chromosome 14.