After forty years spent creating and leading projects and organizations in the field of scientific and technological animation, integration and professional development, health and popular education (including 30 years at the Cité des Sciences et de l'industrie de La Villette) Olivier Las-Vergnas became "Professeur des universités" in Continuing and Adult Education. He worked since 2014 till august 2020 at the University of Lille (formerly Lille - Sciences et technologies). He headed the SEFA component (adult education and training sciences, 2015-2020), and the CIREL research laboratory (UR 4354, 2019-2020) and the internal CIREL-Trigone team. He also assumed the university's delegated vice-presidency for heritage and scientific culture in 2016 and 2017. Since September 2020, he works at the University Paris-Nanterre, at the head of the "Adult Learning and Training" team of the CREF Lab (UR 1589). He is one of the scientific leaders of the two research journals "Savoirs" and "TransFormations" .
His research focuses on the effects of school categorization in " scientist " or not, as well as on its transgression, particularly in the context of collaborations between lay people and academic researchers, as is the case with amateur scientists, co-researchers in health and in situations of popular epidemiology. He leads work on "new reflective cooperation in health", "informal e-learning" situations and the institutionalization of "scientific and technological culture" in France. He also directs a Master's degree course in "adult education design".
Olivier Las-Vergnas has also explored this field as a data analysis specialist and astrophysicist, a practitioner-researcher in the field of scientific mediation and so-called collaborative sciences, as president of the French astronomy association (http://afastronomie.fr) and as creator and director of the Cités des métiers and the Cité de la Santé at La Villette-Universcience in Paris or of "Nuits des étoiles". He is also honorary president of the international network of Cities of Crafts (see http://reseauCitesdesmetiers.org) and author of novels of social anticipation (editions "Pocket" and "the stowaway"). He is one the first french inductees of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame hosted by the University of Oklaoma City (https://www.halloffame.outreach.ou.edu).
In particular, he was associated with the team at the UPMC's Multidimensional Statistics Laboratory where he defended his thesis in universe sciences (co-supervised with the Paris-Meudon Observatory) under the direction of Jean-Paul Benzecri, the inventor of correspondence analysis. He is still working today on the application of data analysis and classification methods in human sciences, bibliometrics and scientometry.
He is also the author of novels of social anticipation ("Pocket" and "Le passager clandestin" publishers) which deal with expert-systems, artificial intelligence and computerized story telling.
Personal pages: http://lasvergnas.eu ; OLV's Bio on the pages of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame: https://www.halloffame.outreach.ou.edu/inductions/hof-2018/vergnas/