CNRS senior scientist (directeur de recherche CNRS)

Institut Élie Cartan de Lorraine, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France

News:

With my postdoctoral associate Lucas Teyssier, we solved a conjecture of Aldous on the mixing time of a Markov chain on cladograms (=unrooted nonplane binary trees with labeled leaves). The preprint is here.
As part of the research project LOUCCOUM (for Large Objects Under Combinatorial Constraints and Outside Uniform Models), funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency), we have organized a research school at CIRM in June 2026 (8th-12th). The main lecturers were Jean-François Marckert (Bordeaux), Sumit Mukherjee (Columbia) and Fiona Skerman (Uppsala).

Some research topics:

Scaling limits and mixing time of Markov chains on combinatorial objects;
Random permutations, patterns and permutons (see a picture of the Brownian separable permuton);
Meanders and meandric systems;
Central limit theorems for sums of weakly dependent variables: I have recently introduced a new tool, weighted dependency graphs, to obtain this kind of results;
Large deviation theory, in particular for random combinatorial structures;
Algebraic combinatorics, and in particular combinatorics in the symmetric group algebra and its representations (Young diagrams, factorizations in symmetric groups and associated graphs embedded in surfaces, Jucys-Murphy elements) ;

Short CV:

2023-now: CNRS senior scientist (directeur de recherche) in IECL, Nancy.
2020-2023: CNRS junior scientist (chargé de recherche) in IECL, Nancy. Habilitation thesis (HDR) defended in Sepember, 2021.
2013-2020: Assistant professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Zurich.
2013: Cours Peccot in College de France.
2009-2013: CNRS junior scientist (chargé de recherche) in LaBRI (University Bordeaux 1).
2006-2009: PhD candidate in LIGM (University Paris-Est Marne-La-Vallée).

You can also have a look at my detailed CV (version of May 2024, in French).

Contact:

firstname "dot" lastname "at" univ-lorraine "dot" fr

Valentin Féray, office 514

Institut Élie Cartan de Lorraine

Université de Lorraine, Site de Nancy

Boîte postale 70239

F-54506 Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy

Logo CNRS