Antoine Simond

As far back as he can remember, Antoine Simond has always been fascinated by the marine environment and more particularly by cetaceans. His university career mainly took place  in France, his country of origin, and has always been linked to the marine world. In 2009, he first graduated with a specialized technical college diploma on the marine environment at Intechmer (Cherbourg, France), followed by a bachelor's degree in marine biology and ecology (La Rochelle University, France). Subsequently, he completed in 2013 a master's degree specializing in the study and assessment of anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems (Le Havre University, France). In 2014, he started a doctoral project in biology (University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada) supervised by Jonathan Verreault (Université du Québec à Montréal) and Magali Houde (Environment and Climate

Change Canada), and entitled: "Organohalogen contaminants in belugas and the Minke whales from the St. Lawrence Estuary: Temporal Trends and Potential Effects on the Endocrine System and the Metabolome ". During his doctoral project, Antoine specialized in toxicogenomics and metabolomics applied to marine mammals. Since August 2020, Antoine has started a postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Tanya Brown (DFO Vancouver, Canada), with whom he continues to specialize in marine mammal ecotoxicology. The objectives of this new project are 1) to identify and monitor priority contaminants of concern (e.g., PCBs, PBDEs, inherited and commonly used pesticides, mercury, chloroalkanes) within the habitat (sediments) and the food web (prey) of the endangered St. Lawrence Estuary beluga population, and 2) to investigate correlations between concentrations of contaminants and biological markers in different tissues of belugas (i.e., plasma, liver, blubber)