Michel Pain

Michel Pain is a CNRS Researcher at the Toulouse Mathematics Institute (Université de Toulouse). Previously, he held a Courant Instructor position at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (2019-2021) and completed his PhD in probability theory at Sorbonne Université under Zhan Shi, focusing on branching Brownian motion.

His research spans log-correlated fields, including branching Brownian motion/random walks, Derrida-Retaux models, and β-ensembles. He studies extremal statistics, stochastic structures, and phase transitions in hierarchical systems.

Michel has published extensively on branching processes, weighted trees, and log-correlated random matrices, with recent work on supercritical phase overlaps (2025) and height asymptotics for weighted trees (2024). His supervised students include PhD candidate Louis Chataignier and several Bachelor/Master thesis authors.

He currently teaches the Master 2 course Branching Processes with Pascal Maillard, having previously taught advanced probability at Université Toulouse III, complex analysis at NYU, and integration theory at ENS Paris.