Since his first direct contact with computers in 1982 at the “Station Marine de Villefranche-sur-Mer” in France, Nicolas has always been fascinated by their capacity for information storage and data analyses in Systematics.
It took him two master’s degrees to acquire a combination of biological oceanography background and computer engineering skills to end up in the Biodiversity Informatics unit at the Museum of Natural History in Paris (MNHN, 1992-2005) where he obtained a Doctorate (PhD) on this subject.
Nicolas participated in many biodiversity informatics projects between 1999 and 2005, including ERMS then WoRMS and Fauna Europaea. He also helped organize the 3rd Global Biodiversity Information Facility Governing Board in Paris, and the first release of the Catalogue of Life, both in 2001.
In 2005, he moved to the Philippines to take on the role of project manager for FishBase, a project he had been collaborating with since 1995. He stayed in that position until 2014, also combining it with the role of director of the WorldFish Center office in the Philippines. Back then, he was also the taxonomic chair for the Catalogue of Life.
In 2014, Nicolas moved to Crete to become the scientific director of LifeWatchGreece, a project of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research.
After some consultancies with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, in 2019, he joined both the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia as the collection manager of the UBC Fish Collection and the Sea Around Us, Institute of Oceans and Fisheries (also at UBC) as a biodiversity informatics specialist.