Thomas Chartier received an engineering degree in 2011 from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, with major in Mathematics and Physics. Interested in life sciences from a physicist's perspective, he followed an interdisciplinary Masters programme at Paris Diderot University and became familiar with various animal models and research topics: biophysics in the nematode Caenorhabditis, neurogenetics in the fruitfly Drosophila, cognitive psychology in the Guinea baboon. He was introduced to philosophy and history of biology, while working on the notion of cell type and tissue classification with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Kupiec at ENS Paris. He is currently a 4th-year PhD student with Detlev Arendt at EMBL Heidelberg, in Germany. Using a recently established animal model, the marine worm Platynereis dumerilii, he seeks to better understand the evolutionary origin of a fundamental animal cognitive ability: associative learning.