Nicolas Pettiaux

Nicolas Pettiaux
Nationality	Belgian
Fields	Physics / Computing
Notable awards	Received the Belgian and American Educational Foundation (BAEF) grant in 1993 and invited to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in 1987

Nicolas Pettiaux is a French-speaking Belgian physicist born on April 8, 1966 in Brussels, Belgium.

Nicolas Pettiaux teaches at the École Supérieure d'Informatique in Bruxelles and is a scientific fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is also a specialist of free software, Open Access and the free share of knowledge which he advocates.

In 1987, then student, active with the Jeunesses Scientifiques de Belgique, the Belgian youth science movement, Nicolas Pettiaux has been invited to attend the Nobel Prize award ceremony, with about 50 other students from other countries invited in Stockholm.

He holds a master in physics and a doctorate in sciences, speciality physics. His thesis was about nonlinear optics, lasers and quantum optics presented at the Université libre de Bruxelles under the supervision of Paul Mandel,^[1] in collaboration with Claude Fabre of Ecole normale supérieure and Thomas Erneux then at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He published papers on quantum optics, lasers and others topics.^[2]

During his thesis, he worked with professor Irina Veretennicoff^[3] of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). His annex thesis was in the field of operational research under the supervision of Bertrand Mareschal.

During his studies, Nicolas Pettiaux studied quantum physics with future Nobel Prize laureate François Englert and statistical physics with Franqui Prize laureate Radu Balescu.

In 1991, Nicolas Pettiaux was one of the secretaries of the Congrès Solvay about quantum optics.

From 1993 till 1997, Nicolas Pettiaux has been teacher assistant at the Faculty of Medecine of Université libre de Bruxelles for the course of physics in the first year. He was an internal consultant at Fortis Banque, ICT manager at the Ministry of the Brussels Region, ICT manager at the Commission communautaire française (Cocof), teacher of physics at some secondary schools, teaching assistant for the courses in first and second years at the Faculty of engineering of Université libre de Bruxelles.

As a secondary school teacher, he was an active physics teacher.^[4] Since 2011, Nicolas Pettiaux has been senior lecturer at the l'École Supérieure d'Informatique (Bruxelles)^[5]

Since 1998, Nicolas Pettiaux has been an active promoter of free software, open standards (see frwiki:Standards ouverts et logiciels libres en Belgique), open access. He has been a board member of APRIL,^[6] of AFUL^[7][8]

References

1. "Nicolas PETTIAUX". ulb.ac.be.
2. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22nicolas+pettiaux%22
3. "Irina Veretennicoff". vub.ac.be.
4. "Archives - lesoir.be". lesoir.be.
5. "ESI - NPX". heb.be.
6. "Nicolas Pettiaux se présente". april.org.
7. Deschamps F-E, Portrait IT : Nicolas Pettiaux, Datanews, 6 février 2004, p. 21-22
8. Robert VISEUR (12 March 2004). "LogicielLibre.Net - Nicolas Pettiaux (AFUL) in Datanews". logiciellibre.net.