I'd like to give you here a more personal sense of who I am. I grew up mainly in Montreal, Canada, curious about the world around me and constantly asking “Why?” My first grade teacher predicted with prescience that I would become a philosopher, but my affinity for science and the strong scientific presence in my family initially led me towards a career in biology. My plan was to make a contribution to human wellbeing through medical research.

At Harvard University, where I did my undergraduate degree in biochemistry, I explored other fields like philosophy and psychology, and by the time I'd finished my PhD in Basel, Switzerland, in a field removed from human wellbeing, I knew that a classical academic career was not what I wanted. After several years in the Swiss fragrance industry, working with perfumers and trying to better understand the molecular basis of the sense of smell, I found myself in an unsatisfying corporate job, and despite my love for powder, snowboarding in the Alps on the weekends was insufficient compensation. A two-year stint at a Geneva-based communications agency that had just received the European mandate for the Gates Foundation allowed me to reconnect with issues I cared about. And then, with a renewed sense of purpose, I embarked on a new path.

My trajectory since then has been a deep exploration of the question “What matters?” and what to do about it, with a focused effort to share my understanding and put it to practical effect in having impact on the world. I spent several years writing my first book, starting from a collection of notes and essays I had accumulated, in which I aimed to take a brutally honest and unbiased approach to answering the above question. The result was The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe, published in 2011.

It has been highly rewarding and inspiring to discover how closely some of my ideas converged with those of a growing community of thinkers and doers committed to reducing human and non-human suffering in the world. In 2015 I produced a 20-minute film with the same title as the book to communicate some of the key messages in a readily accessible form.

In 2016 I founded the Swiss-based think-and-do tank Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) with the goal of making the the prevention of intense suffering of all sentient beings a global priority. We have held events at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and with the Health Ministry of Burkina Faso to help ensure access to pain relief to all in need. We have since been focusing increasingly on promoting compassionate governance more broadly.

In 2023 my new book The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering was published, delving deeper into ethics and offering a more holistic framework that reconciles the frequent conflict between intuition and rationality.

I give talks for various audiences, including effective altruists, MBA students, philosophers, cluster headache patients, aspiring vegans, environmentalists and other activists, and I occasionally organise workshops on compassion, self-compassion and ethics. I am also a regular guest on podcasts.

When I am not writing and working on OPIS-related activities, I enjoy hiking, snowboarding, electronic music and various forms of conscious dance such as Ecstatic Dance, 5 Rhythms and Contact Beyond Contact (CBC).