About
Thelma Panaïotis
PhD in numerical ecology · R trainer · Data science consultant
I hold the French agrégation in life and earth sciences, a national teaching qualification. My PhD looked at what AI can bring to the study of plankton: analysing millions of images to understand how plankton communities are distributed.
Today I pass this expertise on through R training and data science consulting. My approach combines scientific rigour with accessible teaching.
When I’m not preparing a course, I’m training for my next triathlon.
My path
- ENS Paris-Saclay and the agrégation in life and earth sciences: training as a biologist and as a teacher.
- PhD in marine ecology at the Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche-sur-Mer: automated detection and classification of millions of plankton images with deep learning, then analysis of how communities are distributed across spatial and temporal scales.
- Master’s level teaching during my PhD: multivariate analysis, data processing and machine learning, 64 hours a year.
- Postdoc at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, where I regularly ended up fixing my colleagues’ R scripts and explaining statistical methods to them.
- 2026: founding Pyranhia, to make teaching my full-time job.
What research taught me
Six years of research gave me standards I bring to every course: justified methods, honestly evaluated results, and code that someone else can read and rerun. Two of my projects are told on the blog, without jargon (in French, your browser can translate them):
- Classifying millions of plankton images: why small models are often enough;
- Three plankton communities: how PCA and clustering reveal patterns at the scale of the ocean.