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Current work:

My main task at MESR is to support the French scientific community in their effort to join the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and to advance a seemless data and computing infrastructure in France. In this role I represent the French interests for example at e-IRG and in the EOSC Steering Board. Since February 2022 I am co-chairing this European expert group together with Anna Panagopoulou of the European Commission. At the national level I am co-chairing the Collège EOSC-France, the French national EOSC initiative, which includes the key actors of EOSC in France.
My point of view on the EOSC has been expressed in an interview in January 2020 (in French).

At the Institut national de physique nucléaire et de physique des particules (IN2P3) I was scientific director and as such responsible for the domain of computing and data science. In this position I was especially interested in maintaining and advancing a strong computing infrastructure for IN2P3, and to support research activities in computing and data science. In the context of this position I was a member of CERN's LHC Experiments Committee (LHCC) and chief reviewer of CERN's Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG).
In order to provide more publication possibilities for researchers and engineers in the domain between computing and (astro)particle physics, we have launched in 2017 the journal Computing and Software for Big Science, and I am editor-in-chief for this journal.

INTEGRALMy scientific interests in astrophysics are related to the high-energy sky and I have been studying hard X-ray sources using (among others) the instruments of ESA's INTEGRAL mission. Especially I am interested in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and X-ray binaries. In 2009 we have finished the work on the Second INTEGRAL AGN Catalogue, containing 200 objects. I have studied several AGN in greater detail, like NGC 2992, NGC 4388, NGC 4151, and Centaurus A.

AGN unified scheme, Beckmann & Shrader (2012) In 2012 Wiley published our text book

"Active Galactic Nuclei"

which I wrote together with Chris Shrader (NASA/GSFC). This book is partly based on my

Habilitation thesis (September 2010)

I have been also working with data from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. My main research area was what we can learn from the Burst Alert Telescope about variability of AGN in hard X-rays, and a study has been published in 2007 in A&A: Hard X-ray Variability of AGN. A follow-up study using a much larger data set, more sources and improved techniques led by Simona Soldi has been published in 2014. The Fermi Gamma-ray mission, which has been launched in June 2008, was also an important aspect of my work. For example, I have published a study about the Fermi/LAT data on INTEGRAL detected blazars. Together with my PhD student Sandra de Jong, we published studies of the spectral energy distribution and emission processes of the radio galaxy 3C 111 and of the blazar M87.


During my PhD I have been working on luminosity functions of X-ray selected BL Lacertae objects and I studied their evolutionary behaviour. This project was also the main reason for my research activities in 1999 and 2000 at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera in Milan (Italy), where I have been working with BL Lac spectra, taken with the BeppoSAX satellite.
Another project was to determine the local (z < 0.07) luminosity function of Seyfert 2 galaxies, using objective-prism-plates of the Hamburg/ESO-Survey (HES). Results from the BL Lac project and from the Seyfert II research can be found in my publications and also in my

PhD thesis (December 2000)



My master thesis I did in the X-ray astronomy group at the Hamburger Sternwarte where I worked on ROSAT data:
ROSAT archive

Diploma thesis (November 1996)