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Hi, I am Romain Thomas

Romain Thomas

PhD student at Politecnico di Torino, I study how enhanced weathering - the application of silicate rock powder in croplands - can help remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Specifically, I am developing a modelling framework to evaluate its CO2 removal potential. My research activities include aggregating open-source data, programming and coupling models and running large scale simulations and analysis. I am also working with open data, including OpenAlex, to do bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing. On my free time, I develop OpenAlex Analysis as well as other electronics projects.

IT skills

Experiences

1
Politecnico di Torino

Nov 2025 - Present

Turin, Italy

PhD student

Nov 2025 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Working on ecohydrology and enhanced weathering modelling.
  • Developping a modelling framework for large scale hydroclimatic and biogeochemical simulations and analysis.

Université Paris-Saclay

Jan 2025 - Nov 2025

Paris, France

Data analyst for bibliometrics and NLP

Jan 2025 - Nov 2025

Responsibilities:
  • Creating tools for data visualisation and developing methodologies that leverage open data and open-source code for bibliometric analysis to support open-science initiatives.
  • Building an Elasticsearch-based database to map the University’s research publications, enhanced with text vectorization and topic modelling
  • Developing and conducting bibliometric analyses and generating comprehensive reports to support research evaluation and strategic decision-making.
2

3
Stockholm Resilience Centre

Feb 2023 - Aug 2024

Stockholm, Sweden

Research assistant

Aug 2023 - Aug 2024

Responsibilities:
  • Adding case studies from the scientific literature to the Regime Shift DataBase
  • Creation of a form with React and an API with FastAPI (Python)
  • Definition of the data structure with JSON Schema and migration of the existing data
  • Programming utility tools to explore the database in Python and R, and validate the data against the JSON schema
  • Exploring machine learning models and topic modelling techniques to classify articles about regime shifts
  • Co-organization of the Stockholm Resilience Center coding club and workshops facilitation
  • Contributions to the Python library for OpenAlex PyAlex
Internship

Feb 2023 - Jul 2023

Responsibilities:
  • Creation of a Python library and a web app to download, analyse and plot metadata of scientific articles from OpenAlex
  • Analysing the sustainability sciences landscape with bibliometric data

Phaselab Instruments

Feb 2021 - Jul 2022

Troyes, France

Junior engineer

Aug 2021 - Jul 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Working with researchers and PhD students to create small SPR systems (Surface Plasmon Resonance)
  • Electronic circuit design: creation and assembly of PCBs
  • Firmware programming in C on STM32
Internship

Feb 2021 - Jul 2021

Responsibilities:
  • Image and signal processing in Python with an embedded camera
  • Prototyping with 3D printers and a CNC router
4

5

Troyes, France

Civic service

Sep 2019 - Feb 2020

Responsibilities:
  • Ambassador of the “cordées de la réussite” for 6 months. This is a program that aims to encourage and help underprivileged pupils to continue their studies.

Education

Master in Sustainability
Engineering and management of the environment and the sustainable development:
Life cycle assessment and eco conception of a solar panel installation, Corporate Social Responsibility pre-diagnosis in a local company, material flow analysis, general knowledge in green IT and low tech.
Networks and telecommunications
Engineering degree specialized in embedded systems and internet of things:
Skills development in computer science and embedded electronics (programming, circuit board design, sensor networks…), Linux systems, networks and signal processing.

Projects

OpenAlex Analysis
2023 - Present

A python library to download, analyse or plot articles, institutions, and other entities data from the OpenAlex API.

PyAlex
2023 - Present

Contributions to the Python library for OpenAlex PyAlex.

Bibliotech
2024 - Present

A framework to explore and analyse scientific articles: from PDF files, extract the full-text, enrich the metadata with OpenAlex, and add each paragraph to an Elasticsearch database. Kibana is used to provide the web interface. Fully based on open-source software and available on GitHub.

Realization of educational projects
2018 - 2022

Creation and organization of various workshops for middle and high school students through several events (science festival, middle or high school workshops…): low tech initiation, wireless programmable robot with scratch…

Indoor localization
2022

AI-based project where we created and trained our own model to localize a computer in a room with the WiFi signal. It was programmed in Python using TensorFlow.

LED driver PCB
2024 - Present

Configurable PCB based on an ESP32-C3 super mini to control LED via Wi-Fi.

Publications

From Open-data to Open-source Reporting: Introducing the BiSO

In this paper, we present the Biso, an automated report created to help Université Paris-Saclay research units with monitoring Open Science policy compliance in their output. It includes, first the main goals of the project, then the guidelines followed during software development, finally a brief overview of the data sources and some of the metrics and visualizations. Since the project’s aim is to provide a flexible infrastructure for automated reporting from open sources, including but not limited to the BiSO, the paper explains how the technical infrastructure can be used in the future for other report types.

Ce poster présente l’outil BiblioHub, un logiciel en licence libre visant à utiliser les données de ScanR et du Baromètre National de la Science Ouverte en les croisant avec des données institutionnelles dans une même instance ElasticSearch - Kibana. Cette approche, conjuguée à l’intégration de fonctionnalités d’IA, permet d’établir la cartographie de la production scientifique d’une institution et de produire des visualisations à partir du traitement sémantique des titres et abstracts des publications intégrées. BiblioHub vise donc à faciliter la cartographie de la production des institutions qui l’utilisent en vue d’améliorer le pilotage de la recherche et de la valorisation.

Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts

Financial investments will be affected by ecological regime shifts through the loss of natural resources underpinning the dependencies of most economic sectors. We suggest one possible pathway to link industry and products to the likelihood of ecological regime shifts. The challenges and opportunities are discussed at each step, including datasets, methods, and metrics. To this end, we identify recent large-scale, state-of-the-art literature that can link land-based company activities to regime shifts. The estimation of investment exposure to regime shifts is possible, but higher resolution in company trade data, as well as spatially explicit datasets of commodity production, is needed to improve estimations. This will require a coordinated effort from the scientific community, businesses, and the policy sector.

Volunteering

Elected student

At the governing boards, discussing and voting the strategy and the budget of the institution. In relation with each stakeholder, we helped to develop the European project EUt+ and argued for more gender equality and sustainability in both research and teaching.

Technical expert for student organizations
UTT 2017 - 2021

Helping students to realize their projects in the maker space of the university. I made the electronics and programming of the robots for the French robotic cup. As well as for IT, I became a referent for questions and repairs relating to 3D printing. During this time, I participated to develop the maker space by finding funds and managing the organization as president.

Board member
UTT alumni 2023 - present

Involved in the project pass mobilité plus, aiming to facilitate low carbon mobility for students. We are providing Interrail passes to students and helping them with the trip planning.