Tess Breton
PhD student at MAP5 & Inria PreMedical | MVA | École Polytechnique
I am currently a first-year PhD student in MAP5 at Université Paris-Cité and the PreMedical team at Inria Montpellier. I am supervised by Antoine Chambaz (MAP5), Julie Josse (PreMedical) and Geneviève Robin (MAP5). My research interests lie at the intersection of Causal Inference and High-Dimensional Statistics, with a strong focus on medical applications. I collaborate with clinicians to better understand treatment response heterogeneity in diverse settings. With Prof. Isabelle Sermet-Gaudelus, I explore the spatiotemporal dynamics of treatment response in patients with cystic fibrosis treated with Kaftrio. With Drs. Arthur James and Nicolas Gatulle, I build treatment recommendation rules to better anticipate the need for fresh frozen plasma in trauma centers. On the mathematical side, I am particularly interested in causal inference, interpretability, conformal prediction and distributional robustness.
Before that, I followed the MVA master’s program at ENS Paris-Saclay. I did my end-of-studies internship at Owkin, where I worked on predicting response to chemotherapy in patients with bladder cancer. We used models trained on preclinical data, taking as input a set of RNAseq modalities. I have a strong academic background in Statistics and Machine Learning from my years at École Polytechnique, where I specialized in Applied Mathematics. In 2024, I was an intern at Columbia University for four months, working on modeling the dynamics of extra-chromosomal DNA in the Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics under the supervision of Simon Tavaré and Khanh Ngoc Dinh. A year before that, I was a member of the Advanced Visualization team at GE HealthCare, where my internship project consisted in evaluating the robustness of a Deep Learning algorithm for lung nodule detection and segmentation on CT scans.
Beyond academics, I’m passionate about hiking and traveling. Over the past few years and as part of my curriculum, I’ve had the opportunity to spend several months in both Côte d’Ivoire and the United States, which I really enjoyed. And the picture was taken during a roadtrip in Iceland! Music is another big part of my life – I’ve been playing the piano for over 10 years, and still love learning new pieces :)