 Nicholas Ayache is a Civil Engineer from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne (1980), holds a Master of Science from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA, 1981), a PhD and a Thesis from the University of Paris Sud (1983 and 1988).He is research director at Inria (Institut national de recherche en informatique et mathématiques appliquées), where he leads the EPIONE  research team, dedicated to the digital patient and digital medicine .Since 2019, he has also been the Scientific Director of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Artificial Intelligence (3IA) of the Côte d'Azur.