People

Atmospheric remote sensing, Inverse problems, Operational constraint, Sofware engineering, System Modeling

Education:

PhD in Applied Sciences, ULB Faculty of Sciences, Jan 1997
Civil engineering (orientation: physics, solid-state), ULB Polytechnic School, June 1992

Ph.D. thesis title: "Dynamics of multimode lasers and of lasers controlled by delayed feedback"

Short biography:

Didier Pieroux obtained a master degree in Applied Sciences (orientation: solid-state physics) in 1992 and a Ph.D in the dynamics of non-linear optical systems in 1997, both at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). After that, he pursued research activities for 4 years as a post-doc. During this academic phase, he published 27 papers in peer-reviewed journals, among which 14 as first author.

He then worked for 12 years as software engineer (development in C++, Java, Ada and Python, and system architecture in UML), technical team leader and project manager in miscellaneous domains such as satellite remote sensing, industrial process simulation, air traffic management and medical process control.

In September 2009, he joined the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy as scientific software engineer to develop a ground-based measurement database. Two years later, he was internally hired project manager of PICASSO, an ESA Earth-observation in-orbit demonstration CubeSat mission, and then of ALTIUS, an ESA Earth-Watch mission. In September 2018, he seized the opportunity to lead the develop the ALTIUS operational L2 processor, which requires both scientific expertise and S/W engineering rigour.