Date of birth: 27/04/1975
Nationality: French

Professional address:
Nordita, Roslagstullsbacken 23
10691 Stockholm
Sweden
Phone: +46-8-5537-8718
E-mail: rplasson AT nordita.org

Raphaël Plasson received his PhD at the university of Montpellier II, France in 2003. After a post-doc at Keio University in Japan, and then at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, he joined Nordita as a fellow in 2007.

He has been involved in the field of prebiotic chemistry, studying the property of chemical systems that could be present on primitive Earth. Initially focused on experimental study of amino acid reactivity, his interest gradually got oriented towards more and more theoretical aspects. On the basis of the knowledge of experimental properties of simple molecules, he built a new model for the emergence of biological homochirality. In that context, his present work is now to study the multiple aspects of more general complex chemical systems, including their non-equilibrium thermodynamic properties and the study of the bifurcation behaviors, the possibility of emergence of autocatalysis using the topological analysis of the global network, the computer modeling of their kinetic evolution, and the development of methods for the design of non-linear chemical networks.

Raphaël is involved in an interdisciplinary and international community, actively participating to the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL), the European Astrobiology Network Association (EANA), The Swedish Astrobiology Network (SWAN) and the Astrobiology Graduate School of Stockholm University. At Nordita, he co-organized with Axel Brandenburg a one month program on "Origins of Homochirality".