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Photos taken in October 2007



Photos taken in May 2000.




I was born on 15th August 1965. After some travel, following my father in his international scientific career as a chemist, my family settled back to Switzerland in the little village of Echandens VD, close to Lausanne, a few kilometers away from the Lake of Geneva.

I followed elementary school in Echandens, then the secondary 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 (published in 1997 and re-edited in 2007), 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. Starting in June 2001, I have worked in the same city in interest rate risk management at balance sheet level. Since May 2008, I have been active in private banking, both in Zurich and Geneva, in all fields of risk management: credit risk of bank counterparties, collateral risk on lombard loans, market risk for proper trading, operational risk, i.e. data, IT, physical, reputation, legal, process and fraud risk.

In January 2004, I managed to publish a very ambitious short book, La Faillite coupable des retraites, claiming nothing less than to explain the worldwide drop in birth rates, observed in varying degrees in the US, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Italy, and recently even Brazil, Iran and Tunisia. The explanation has to do with a generally overlooked bias plaguing modern retirement systems.

In the meantime, I was lucky enough to be able to add more places to my visit-of-the-world list: Canada (Quebec), eastern and western USA, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece, Egypt, India (Cahsmere, Penjab, Uttar Pradesh), southern and central Japan.

(Last update: May 04, 2013)



You might write me at the following address:      dcosan@gmx.net









Photos taken in October and November 2016





Created: 31 Jan 2010 – Last updated: 05 Feb 2017