Nicolas MOËS is professor at the Ecole Centrale de Nantes (France).
He received his engineering degree from the University of Liège in 1992 and his PhD from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan under the supervision of Pierre Ladevèze in 1996.
Before joining the Ecole Centrale of Nantes in 2001, he gained research experience in the United States: 2 years at the University of Texas at Austin in the group of Tinsley Oden and 3 years at Northwestern University in the group of Ted Belytschko where he initiated the eXtended Finite Element Method (X-FEM) with colleagues.
His main area of expertise is computational mechanics: fracture and damage (X-FEM, Thick Level Set approach, Lip-field approach), contact mechanics (Inequality Level Set approach) and more recently a novel way to track front (X-MESH).
His fundings are balanced between public funding from France and Europe (ERC Advanced grant in 2012, ERC Synergy Grant 2022 ) and collaborations with a dozen of industries in the past 20 yeas.
He received the young investigator award from the IACM (International Association for Computational Mechanics) in 2006 and was declared IACM fellow in 2008. In 2014, he received the silver medal from CNRS. In 2019, he received the ONERA prize from the French academy of science, in which he was elected two years later. He is also currently member of the Institut Universitaire de France.