Researcher portrait: Stéphane Mangeon

G’day,

I am Stéphane Mangeon (PhD), a CERC postdoctoral fellow in the Model-Data Fusion team in CSIRO

Data61. Leaving countryside France to go study in the United Kingdoms for University, I eventually

received a PhD in Space and Atmospheric Physics from Imperial College London and the UK Met Office,

where I built its fire module for climate models (INFERNO). I worked with the UN’s World Meteorological

Organisation and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) on South-East Asian

Haze events. Then I spent about a year in commercial Data Science and AI in Singaporean start-ups. My

wife and I moved to Brisbane in 2019 to work with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial

Research Organisation (CSIRO). Now, my time is split between working on Data Science research (Data

Assimilation frameworks for count data), the spark bushfire simulator, and bushfire risk mapping for

commercial clients.

Allow me to say a little more about the latter. It is established that bushfires are a major natural hazard

here in Australia, and are compounded by droughts and vegetation that can significantly quicken fire

spread. Yet bushfires remain particularly difficult to predict, from ignition risks to spread and the

aftermath: the losses due to fires. Nevertheless, many sectors of the Australian economy and government

need to make informed decisions based on the risk that bushfire might occur and if they do, on their likely

consequences.

Fortunately, we have a growing number of methods and tools to support these stakeholders. In my work,

these would be:

• Data science and statistics, as exemplified by the bushfire Data Quest (https://www.fdlausnz.org/). We have a growing amount of

data available, and in the quality of algorithms available to handle that data.

• Fire spread and consequence simulations, through dynamics-driven models such as the Spark fire

If this is of interest, I am keen to connect with other scientists and build up some sustainable

collaborations between France and Australia on the topic.