History

The Biometrics Unit of ENSAM (Montpellier National School of Agronomy) was created in 1982 on the Gaillarde campus, with research activities focusing on statistics applied to agronomy. It was directed by Yves Escoufier then Alain Berlinet, both professors at the University of Montpellier II. Jean-Pierre Vila, research director at INRA, took charge in 1994 and in 1998 created the INRA / SupAgro ASB joint research unit (Analysis of Systems and Biometrics).

UMR ASB took over from the biometrics unit, opening up a complementary orientation in modeling and control of dynamic systems. Pr. Pierre Cartigny, headed the UMR from 2008 to 2009. Alain Rapaport, research director at INRA took over the management of the UMR from 2009 to 2014, supported by Pascal Neveu as deputy director. In addition to research activities in statistics (more oriented towards the analysis of functional data since 2008) and in modeling / control of dynamic systems, activities around the representation of knowledge and information systems have been considerably strengthened, so that in 2009, the UMR was renamed 'MISTEA', to display the three methodological themes (mathematics, statistics and informatics).

At the same time, in 2004, a joint INRA-INRIA research team called ‘MERE’ (Modeling And Water Resources) was founded by Claude Lobry. In 2012, the new joint INRA-INRIA “MODEMIC” team (Modeling and Optimization of Dynamics of MICrobial Ecosystems) took over; the team was then hosted by MISTEA.

MISTEA, managed since 2014 by Pascal Neveu, then joined at the management by Nadine Hilgert as deputy end of 2017, remained structured in two research teams until 2020: MOCAS (Modeling, Optimization and Control of Agro-Systems, resulting from MODEMIC in 2016 ) and GAMMA (management and statistical analysis of data in agronomy). It has since been structured into 3 axes: Dynamic Systems, Probabilities & Statistics, and Informatics.