Career
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, 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.
During his thesis, he worked with professor Irina Veretennicoff of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). His annex thesis was in the field of operational research under the supervision of Bertrand Mareschal.
In 1991, Nicolas Pettiaux was one of the secretaries of the Congrès Solvay about quantum optics.
He was an internal consultant at Fortis Banque, Information and communications technology manager at the Ministry of the Brussels Region, Information and communications technology 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. Since 2011, Nicolas Pettiaux has been senior lecturer at the l"École Supérieure d"Informatique (Bruxelles)
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.
