Nicolas holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from École Centrale Marseille (France) in 2009. He did his doctorate at Cemagref of Bordeaux in parternship with modelEAU.

The membrane bioreactor technology has been expanding at a fast pace in the last two decades. The final clarifier of the conventional activated sludge process is replaced by membrane filtration to perform solid-liquid separation. It allows reaching a very good and reliable effluent quality with a limited footprint. However, high energy consumption due to reduced oxygen transfer in concentrated sludge and to coarse bubble scouring used to mitigate membrane fouling makes the process uncompetitive in many case. Application of lab-scale results to full-scale operation is complicated because experimental conditions are different. His PhD consisted in putting together an integrated model that included biological processes and membrane fouling. An ASM-based model has been modified to allow linking it with a filtration model. The integrated model has then been calibrated and validated with data from a full scale plant.