Olivier Absil began his civil engineering studies at the University of Liège in 1996: "Fascinated by sciences, I chose the school of applied sciences in order to have a wider range of knowledge and applications.” Graduating in 2001, his final year piece of work led him to be the first citizen of Liège to work on the Darwin space mission, a mission he would stick with.
The first year of his doctoral thesis took place at the Paris Observatory, which offers grants to PhD students to come and learn about interferometry, and in particular, nulling interferometry through the GENIE project, a ground demonstrator of the Darwin technologies. Olivier Absil then came back to Liège, where he defended his thesis in 2006, the aim of which was to prepare the scientific and technological Darwin programme. After two years of post-doctoral research in Grenoble, Olivier Absil returned to Liège at the end of 2008, with a 3-year mandate as head of research at the FNRS.
Français