team

Michael Benson is an American filmmaker and writer who lived in Ljubljana (Slovenia) until the early 1990s. He directed a documentary, Predictions of Fire (Prerokbe Ognja), with the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) movement. He also authored a book, Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes.

For nearly three years, he has been co-developing the Sanctuary project, which he supports with both rigor and intuition. With 15 years of experience, he combines expertise in communication strategy, social media, and project management. He led the digital strategy for institutional events such as COP21 and COP22.

For almost three years, she has passionately supported the Sanctuary project, bringing to it 15 years of experience in communication strategy, foresight, and social media. An expert in institutional communication, influence, and executive consulting, she has contributed to projects for WWF, SNCF, and COP22, always with a sensitive, committed, and creative approach.

RSA Fellow. TED Speaker. Design Lead, Startup Mentor, and Educator. Global Head of Design at Interos.ai. ex-Nokia, Microsoft, and Google. Author of 4 bestseller books. Spoke at 100+ events in 20+ countries, his talks have been watched by 3M+ people, and he has been featured in various magazines and newspapers, such as Wired, New York Times, Science, Nature, BusinessWeek, Creative Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Grafik magazine, Étapes, and El País.

Creative and curious, he designs visualizations that blend analytical precision with artistic expression. In 1999, he built the computing systems for the Genome Sciences Center. Inventor of port knocking and creator of Circos and hive plots, his work has appeared in Nature, Science, Wired, and the New York Times. He teaches scientific visualization and advocates for clear, thoughtful communication of data.

J.-Sébastien Steyer is a paleontologist at the CNRS and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. He is also a lecturer and exhibition curator. A specialist in Pangean faunas, he travels the world in search of fossils. He has authored around a hundred scientific articles and about twenty popular science books, including the bestseller Earth Before the Dinosaurs. He regularly collaborates with artists on Science & Art projects.

Particle physicist at the CEA, she has dedicated her career to exploring the most fundamental constituents of matter. After completing a PhD focused on neutrinos, she turned her attention to more massive particles, first working on the Higgs boson at LEP, then on the Z and W bosons as part of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. She also teaches special relativity and particle physics at École Centrale, sharing her infectious enthusiasm for her field and profession.

Associate Professor at the University of Caen / UR VERTEX 74.80, chronobiologist and physiologist specializing in extreme environments, Benoît Mauvieux studies the mechanisms of human adaptation in extreme conditions. Recently, he participated as a scientist in the Deep Time experiment, where 15 individuals were confined in a cave for 40 days to study the social influence of a group on biological clocks and their desynchronization in the absence of time cues and natural light.

Fleur Hopkins-Loféron is an art historian specializing in scientific imaginaries. She recently published Voir l’invisible. Histoire visuelle du mouvement merveilleux-scientifique. Her latest essay, Les Nouveaux fakirs, explores the fascination with eroticism and dolorism among fakirs. Her current research focuses on the dark academia subculture and antispeciesism in science fiction imaginaries.

French visual artist and designer, Aurélie Bordenave has supported project leaders in communication and scientific mediation to share knowledge with the broadest possible audience. She creates tailored visual and narrative designs, including stop motion, posters, and comics. Recently, she designed the comic for SVOM, a French-Chinese astrophysics project, both as an artist and an independent editor. Aurélie draws during special events as a graphic reporter: whether her drawings are projected live or shared later.

Guillaume Monnain is a graphic facilitator and illustrator, specializing in scientific content. With a scientific background, he worked for 13 years in the pharmaceutical and biomedical industry and then 3 years in a scientific mediation association. He created his company AKENIUM in 2016, dedicated to scientific communication and popularization. He thus offers graphic solutions to promote the understanding, memorization and sharing of scientific and technical content : live drawing and modeling, scribing, sketchnoting and videoscribing.

Lydie Lescarmontier is a glaciologist by training, specializing in the impact of climate change on the polar ice sheets. After 15 years working in research and in a UNESCO center for climate change education, she now works as a consultant for scientific, educational and cultural projects on climate and the polar regions. In 2021, she published La Voix des Pôles with Editions Flammarion.

Alice Varoquaux, alias Lili Walix, has been working as graphic popularizer since 2018, for universities and research institutes such as the CEA and the CNRS. She put her experience as an engineer and her pencils at the service of scientific and technical popularization. She also works for publishing houses, for example by illustrating the book for the general public "Incroyable Microbiote!" published by Leduc, or youth magazines such as "Les Curionautes des sciences" published by Milan and "L'Eléphant junior" published by Scrinéo.

Sébastien Carassou holds a PhD in astrophysics and is an independent science communicator and author. He co-hosts the YouTube channel "Le Sense of Wonder" and has written numerous popular science books, documentaries, and podcasts covering astrophysics, cosmology, astrobiology, Earth system sciences, and space exploration. Since 2024, he has been the scientific coordinator of the Sanctuary on the Moon project.