Thomas Chalaux-Clergue, who defended his thesis in geosciences at Paris-Saclay University on 16 December 2024, has just been awarded one of the 2025 Solemn Thesis Prizes in Sciences “All Specialities” by the Chancellery of the Universities of Paris.
His doctoral work, funded by a CEA research training contract, quantified the impact of decontamination and the return to cultivation of agricultural land on the transfer of sediments and radiocaesium in the rivers of Fukushima. It was co-supervised by Olivier Evrard (LSCE) and Atsushi Nakao (Kyoto Prefectural University) and conducted his research in collaboration with the new Franco-Japanese international laboratory MITATE Lab (International Research Laboratory/IRL 2039), officially supervised by the CNRS, the CEA and Fukushima University. He spent the second year of his thesis immersed in the team of his Japanese co-supervisor in Kyoto, thanks to funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Thomas Chalaux-Clergue has promoted his work through three publications in international journals (and three others are currently being submitted/finalised), the development of several tools and packages on R, and several initiatives in the field of open science. He has won two awards for his presentations at international conferences in Japan, including the Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU) in 2023. He is currently doing postdoctoral research at the University of Augsburg (Germany).
