David Cosandey homepage

I was born in Boston, Massachussetts (United States) on 15th August 1965. I kind of followed my father who was making a postdoc at Harvard at this time. My father was a chemist, my mother was taking care of me. I was the first of a family of two. In October 1966, my parents moved back to Switzerland. We settled in the little village of Echandens, close to Lausanne.

I followed elementary school in Echandens, then the secundary school in Morges, the town nearby, then the high school in Lausanne. I had then a sabbatical year which I exploited to make several journeys. I crossed northwestern Europe on bicycle (Germany, Holland, Belgium, England, Scotland), I explored Eastern Europe (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia) on train and then Northern Africa (Algeria, Marocco) and Southwestern Europe (Spain, France) on auto-stop and bus.

After these nice introductions to the world, I started my physics studies at University of Lausanne, which I finished up in December 1989. By this time, eager to make a change, I had already started to work half-time at an communication agency to write science popularization articles. I was pretty happy with the kind of job, except that I fretted at the meager supply side of the job market. After switching to the Journal de Genève, at this time the highest-level newspaper of the French-speaking Switzerland, I reverted to science.

I did a PhD in physics, at University of Berne, Switzerland, during four years, 1991-94. On parallel (1991-95), I wrote Le Secret de l'Occident, expounding my general theory of the history of science. During my time as a PhD student, however, I realized that, with the end of the Cold War, the subsidies for physics were dwindling. Only the coolest of candidates could pretend for positions, at the price of constantly struggling. I thus decided to switch to the corporate sector. The move was all the more justified that I would now care for a next-generation delegate.

I started in banking as an IT project manager in Geneva, Switzerland, in May 1996. I moved to market risk management in Zurich, Switzerland, in August 1997. I succeeded in writing in Summer 1998 a shorter introduction to my general theory of the history of science, L'Europe et la Science, published in 1999. In October 1998, I switched to credit risk management, in Zurich. Since June 2001, I am working in the same city in interest rate risk management at balance sheet level.