Dr Gwenhaël de Wasseige will join the IRMP as new permanent academic staff member starting from September 2021. She has also been selected by UCLouvain and the Francqui Foundation for the Fancqui start-up grant, consisting of a research budget of 200 k€.
With her arrival, the IRMP will extend its research topics to experimental astroparticle physics, and in particular neutrino and multi-messenger astronomy. This new line of research is complementary to and synergic with several projects already carried out at the IRMP institute, such as particle physics, gravitational waves and neutrino phenomenology.
After completing her PhD thesis between the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the University of Wisconsin at Madison (USA) within the international collaboration IceCube, Gwenhaël de Wasseige continued her research activities at the Astroparticules et Cosmologie (APC) laboratory of the Université de Paris and CNRS, first with a grant from the Ile-de-France region and then as a EU Marie Sklodowska Curie individual fellow. For the past three years, Gwenhaël has left the ice of the South Pole in which the IceCube neutrino telescope is buried, for the Mediterranean Sea and the KM3NeT telescope currently being deployed at two sites, off Toulon (France) and off Sicily (Italy). 
At the IRMP, Gwenhaël will focus on the search for neutrinos emitted during transient phenomena, such as gamma-ray bursts, binary compact mergers, and solar flares. In order to increase the chances of detecting neutrinos, some of the most elusive particles, she will develop multi-messenger and multi-detector approaches, combining information from several telescopes observing the same astrophysical phenomena.
As far as teaching is concerned, prof. de Wasseige will join the Faculty of Science of UCLouvain. She will teach, already from September 2021, the course “Astrophysics and astroparticles” (LPHYS2221) and will also be co-holder of the new course "Physics of accelerators, gravitational waves and physics of astroparticles" (LPHYS2336).