My PhD research is about finding and dating cryptotephras in marine sediment cores around the Horn of Africa, over the last million years. The aims are : to provide a tephrostratigraphic framework, and to correlate these tephras with tuffs from the East African Rift (e.g. Silver Tuff from Konso, Ethiopia) using glass shard geochemistry. The outcomes are : the age of hominin fossils, palaeoclimatology of the area, and volcanic history of the East African Rift System.

I am a limnogeologist based at the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Preventives (National Institute of Preventative Archaeological Research, or INRAP) in Lyon, France. Prior to joining the WTAP in 2010 and refocusing my work on the East African Rift System (EARS) I worked at Lake Baikal in central Asia.

Limnogeology is the study of sediments formed by inland waters (e.g. lakes, ponds, rivers, wetlands), and in West Turkana my specific research interest is the sedimentary cyclicity and temporal evolution of lake deposits, which I use to reconstruct past climatic, tectonic, and environmental changes and how they influenced hominin evolution during the Plio-Pleistocene. My approach involves identifying sequences of ancient lake sediments where they are exposed in the Nachukui Formation and performing detailed sediment analyses to determine the processes and contexts (deep, shallow, endorheic etc) that led to their deposition. As the largest endorheic water body in a desert on earth, Lake Turkana has undergone remarkable changes in size, shape, and hydrology over time, and has played a key role in affecting the environments and locations that were available for hominins to exploit.

I am supervising the ANR NILAFAR project, which aims to quantify hydrological fluctuations and document their consequences on human communities during the transition from hunter-gatherers to agro-pastoralists over the last 20,000 years in Afar region, Ethiopia & Djibouti. It also aims to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms behind the fluctuations of the African monsoon and the episodes of hyper-aridities that occurred within a few hundred years in the past.

I am interested in understanding the mechanisms behind the evolution of climate over the last 100 million years. At the continental scale, I am interested in the interactions between atmosphere and vegetation, and the impact of orographic barriers such as the Rift shoulders on atmospheric dynamics.

Climate and “Earth system” models are my daily tools, but I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches, one of the fundamental questions of my research being to understand the interactions between paleogeography, climate and the evolution of biodiversity over geological time.