International mobility of young scientists: 7 winning projects in 2026

Marie-Claire Andraos, a postdoctoral researcher at the PACTE laboratory (Université Grenoble Alpes), was awarded a grant to carry out a research stay in Turkey, primarily in the Kocaeli region and Istanbul. This mobility is part of the RASED research project (Risks: Analysis and Monitoring of Exposures and Dynamics), dedicated to studying risk exposures in housing and to developing participatory approaches to risk observation.

This stay aims to build a comparative perspective with the project's main fieldsite in Lebanon, particularly in Beirut and the Jezzine region. Both countries share comparable geophysical contexts, marked by active fault lines and significant exposure to seismic risks, as well as similar Mediterranean sociocultural dynamics. This configuration provides a particularly relevant framework for analysing the relationships between disaster memory, risk perception and housing-related practices.

The Kocaeli region, shaped by the 1999 earthquake, and Istanbul, facing significant seismic risk, represent ideal study areas for this comparison. The stay will involve conducting fieldwork surveys with local residents, in collaboration with Kocaeli University, in order to analyse how populations perceive risks, access information and adapt their residential practices.

Supported by the INTERRISK programme, this mobility will strengthen the comparative dimension of the RASED project and help develop international scientific collaborations. In the long run, it will deepen our understanding of social dynamics in the face of natural hazards and contribute to the development of participatory approaches aimed at strengthening the resilience of Mediterranean territories.

Juliette Bazin, a PhD student at the EDYTEM laboratory (geosciences) and the PACTE laboratory (ergonomics), was awarded a grant to carry out a research stay at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mountain Research (CIRM) of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her thesis, funded by the IRIMONT targeted project of the PEPR Risques (IRiMa) programme, focuses on the perception and collective management of glacial and periglacial risks (ROGP) in the Alps, at the intersection of geosciences and ergonomics.

This stay is centred on a recent and unprecedented event: the collapse of the Birch glacier onto the village of Blatten in the Swiss canton of Valais. Although anticipated by a network of academic and operational stakeholders, enabling the preventive evacuation of residents, this event raises fundamental questions: how is scientific knowledge produced when facing an emerging risk? What role does expertise play in risk managers' decision-making? And what space is there for interdisciplinarity when confronted with the cascading phenomena characteristic of glacial and periglacial hazards?

In collaboration with the CIRM — whose work is strongly interdisciplinary around mountain challenges — Juliette Bazin will conduct interviews and surveys with the local stakeholders involved in crisis management: experts, authorities, socio-professional actors from the Valais and the Lötschental valley. The aim is to analyse, using methods drawn from the social sciences and humanities, the dynamics of decision-making, adaptation and resilience deployed during this exceptional event.

This mobility will raise the profile of the PEPR Risques programme and the IRIMONT project within the international community working on glacial and periglacial risks. It will help position French ergonomics as an innovative contribution in a field dominated by geosciences, while generating new data on a terrain that has so far received little attention from a social sciences perspective.

Maureen Shinta Devi, a postdoctoral researcher at the French Geological Survey (BRGM), was awarded a grant to carry out a three-month research stay at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU), from August to October 2026. Her work, attached to the Mountain Risks (PC-2) and Digital Platforms (PC-7) targeted projects of the PEPR Risques (IRiMa) programme, focuses on developing and automating InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) processing chains based on Sentinel-1 satellite images to detect gravitational deformation and map its spatial extent.

This stay builds on a well-established collaboration between BRGM and NGU, developed through several European projects, formalised by a Memorandum of Understanding signed in March 2024, and further supported by ongoing cooperation within EuroGeoSurveys. The objective is to test and refine the workflows developed at BRGM in rural environments, often characterised by substantial vegetation cover, where reduced signal coherence makes InSAR analysis challenging.  These automated workflows will be benchmarked against field data and complementary approaches used by NGU, such as ground-based radars, corner reflectors and field surveys.

Hosted by Dr Gökhan Aslan, a specialist in InSAR-based landslide detection and interpretation, Dr. Maureen Shinta Devi will work on the detailed analysis of one or two study sites already monitored by NGU in Norway. Comparing the automated products developed at BRGM with in-situ validation datasets will help improve the interpretation of slope deformation patterns.

This mobility will contribute to structuring benchmark datasets for landslide monitoring, directly integrable into the IRiMa platform as part of a demonstrator showcasing the use of InSAR for landslide applications. The results will be presented through scientific publications and conference presentations at both national and international levels.

Alix Gand Watteau, a PhD student in geography at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, was awarded a grant to conduct a research stay at the University of the Virgin Islands. This mobility is part of her doctoral thesis, funded by ENS de Lyon with the support of PEPR Risques (IRiMa) programme, which undertakes a comparative analysis of vulnerability and adaptation trajectories to hydroclimatic risks across several Caribbean overseas territories — Saint-Martin, Sint-Maarten and the US Virgin Islands — over the period 2005–2028.

These archipelagos, exposed to similar hazards such as hurricanes, marine flooding and coastal erosion, display different socio-economic contexts and governance models. This diversity provides a particularly relevant framework for analysing, through a diachronic and multiscale approach, the dynamics of vulnerability and adaptation in the face of intensifying hydroclimatic events driven by global environmental change.

The stay will make it possible to articulate local political and social dimensions with regional and global environmental issues, in collaboration with the Eastern Caribbean Center and the Center for Caribbean Green Technologies at the host university. It will also involve the collection of primary data — semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, field observations — to complement those already gathered in the French West Indies.

This mobility represents a central milestone in Alix Gand Watteau's doctoral research: by strengthening her connections with Caribbean and North American scientific networks, it will contribute to the international reach of the PEPR Risques (IRiMa) programme and open new collaborations around vulnerability and risk governance in overseas territories.

Claire Jaffrézic, a PhD student in geography at the ESPACE laboratory (CNRS / Avignon University), was awarded a grant to carry out a three-month research stay at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) of Kyoto University, Japan, from 4 January to 4 April 2027. Her thesis, funded by the NaTech targeted project of the PEPR Risques (IRiMa) programme, focuses on learning from experience in order to optimise alert processes in the management of NaTech crises (Natural Hazard Triggering Technological Accidents).

As a pioneer in NaTech research since the Fukushima disaster (2011), Japan offers a benchmark setting for comparing public alert systems with those developed in France. The stay aims to analyse how alerts are organised in NaTech contexts in Japan, draw lessons from the Fukushima accident, and develop a methodology for mapping evacuation and shelter-in-place routes that can be replicated in France.

Hosted by Professor Yoko Matsuda at the DPRI's Research Center for Disaster Risk Reduction, Claire Jaffrézic will conduct field surveys in Fukushima, interviews with survivors, crisis managers and institutional stakeholders, and comparative observations of local alert processes. The stay will conclude with a seminar presenting initial findings at the DPRI.

This mobility will directly feed into two chapters of the thesis and result in a joint scientific publication with the DPRI. It is fully aligned with one of the central objectives of the NaTech targeted project within the PEPR Risques programme: building and sustaining an international scientific community dedicated to NaTech risks.

Elisa Lahcène, a postdoctoral researcher at the French Geological Survey (BRGM), was awarded a grant to carry out a four-month research stay at the Faculty of Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente, the Netherlands, from October 2026 to February 2027. Her postdoctoral project, funded by the Collective chairs targeted project of the PEPR Risques (IRiMa) programme, focuses on multi-hazard modelling — including tsunamis, Mediterranean flash floods and coastal storms — and on multi-risk assessment along the Alpes-Maritimes coastline.

The mobility aims to complement the modelling work conducted at BRGM with participatory approaches that enable stakeholders to anticipate the consequences of complex, compounding disaster scenarios. A key objective is to identify tipping points — critical thresholds beyond which crisis management and evacuation capacities become insufficient when multiple hazards overlap in time and space.

Under the guidance of Associate Professor Funda Atun and her team, known for the development of the PARATUS Systemic Risk Board Game, Elisa Lahcene will receive training in participatory scenario-building, serious-game co-design and the co-construction of risk mitigation strategies. These skills will then be applied in serious-game workshops with stakeholders across the Alpes-Maritimes — disaster management agencies, local authorities, first responders, policy-makers and others — to simulate complex crisis situations and identify tipping points in emergency response capacities.

This mobility will contribute to developing a new generation of integrated decision-support tools for managing compounding coastal risks — tools that can be transferred to other coastal regions and applied within BRGM to address broader challenges linked to natural hazards and climate change. Joint scientific publications and conference presentations will strengthen collaboration between the two institutions and enhance the visibility of the PEPR Risques programme.

Juliette Pénicaud, a postdoctoral researcher at the EPOC laboratory (University of Bordeaux), was awarded a grant to carry out a three-month research stay at the University of Maine (Orono, United States), starting 1 August 2026. Her postdoctoral project, funded by the PEPR Risques (IRiMa) programme and the PSGAR CORALI programme, focuses on water level dynamics and flooding risk in the Gironde Estuary — the largest in Europe — as part of the IRICOT targeted project.

Estuaries are subject to complex interactions between fluvial and marine components: macrotidal tides, atmospheric surges and river discharge can combine in non-linear ways to generate water levels exceeding the sum of their individual contributions — a phenomenon known as compound flooding. A better understanding of these mechanisms is essential to accurately assess the flood risk faced by the approximately 29,000 people living within the Gironde estuary's flood zones.

This stay will enable Juliette Pénicaud to receive training in the methodology developed by Dr Lauren Ross (University of Maine) for quantifying tide–surge–river interactions from in-situ water level data. Previously applied to the Penobscot Estuary (USA), this method will be transposed to the Gironde using a dense dataset: water level records at 9 stations since 1953, river discharge data since 1959, and pressure and wind fields since 1960. The stay will also include participation in the international PECS conference in Portland, Maine, in August 2026.

The findings will directly feed into the modelling phase of the postdoctoral project and into the ongoing collaboration between the IRICOT and NaTech targeted projects on the impact of coastal flooding on the industrial infrastructure lining the Gironde Estuary. They will result in an open-access scientific publication and a popular science article in The Conversation, contributing to the visibility of the PEPR Risques programme among both scientific and general audiences.