Astronomy is a discipline that requires technical skills and cutting-edge technology . And these can be used to tackle environmental challenges such as climate change or to plan the long-term response to the current famine in southern Madagascar.

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I am a research astronomer at SAAO. My research interests revolve around multiwavelength observations of interacting and collisional ring galaxies to help investigate the formation and evolution mechanisms of young massive clusters. I also work on radio loud AGN to study the AGN duty cycle using deep radio continuum surveys.

The main challenges I encountered were the language barriers (switching from French to English), exposure to a diverse culture in South Africa and especially adapting to the new educational system at the University of Cape Townbwhich required a lot of self-learning, self-discipline and perseverance.

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Before coming to South Africa, I had very little knowledge about astronomy. At the time, there were no such subjects at university. My knowledge of astronomy was therefore limited to what I had learned in secondary school during geography lessons and through documentaries I had watched.

It wasn't easy at first. But I persevered and now I'm used to the language of Shakespeare. I read a lot and practiced English constantly since classes, conversations with friends and colleagues and especially communication outside the university are in English. It took time. But as the famous proverb says: "Practice makes perfect.

I did my undergraduate degree in physics, then a BSc Honours in energy physics at the University of Antananarivo. I then did postgraduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics (BSc Honours, Masters and then PhD thesis) at the University of Cape Town. I obtained my PhD in astronomy in 2015. Between 2015 and 2018, I was a SKA postdoc at the same university.

On the research side, I study young massive star clusters hosted by interacting galaxies and burning ring galaxies to study the effect of the environment on the formation and evolution mechanisms of these proto-clusters. I also search for dying and restarted radio galaxies using LOFAR and MeerKAT to better understand the life cycle of radio galaxies.