About Me

I am a Doctor in Optics, Photonics and Image Processing, having defended my PhD thesis on January 29th, 2026, at the Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille (CPPM), France. My work comes at the intersection of optical instrumentation, image processing, and machine learning, with a strong focus on space science applications.

My PhD thesis focused on modeling the instrumental response of the Euclid space telescope's NISP (Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer) instrument, carried out within the DISPERS project at CPPM. I developed novel methods combining Zernike polynomial decomposition and deep learning (CNNs, autoencoders) to characterize and reconstruct optical aberrations from Point Spread Functions (PSFs) of low-resolution space instruments.

Photo of Lucas Saunière

Research interests

Education

Work experience

Skills

Beyond research

I enjoy applying AI and machine learning to diverse and creative problems — from computer vision pipelines to training MLPs to predict wine aging characteristics. I am also a passionate astronomer and former Vice-President of the IPSA VEGA astronomy association, where I contributed to data analysis from Kepler/K2 and TESS missions and taught astrophotography and astrophysics to fellow students.

Looking for a postdoc

I am currently seeking a postdoc position in Canada or the United States in areas related to optical systems, computational imaging, machine learning for science, or space instrumentation. Feel free to reach out — I would love to discuss opportunities!