About

I grew up on Île d’Orléans, an island very close to Quebec City. I attended CÉGEP François-Xavier-Garneau for my college studies in natural sciences. I earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, computer science, and economics from Laval University.

My undergraduate studies were punctuated by a four-year hiatus, during which I was involved full-time in student organizations. It was during those years that I became involved in politics, as well as in the social sciences. Having initially been trained as a mathematician, I was drawn to economic theory.

I completed my master’s degree in economics at UQÀM under the supervision of Professor Nicolas Marceau. My thesis focused on the cost of higher education and college attendance. I graduated at the top of my class.

I then earned a Ph.D. in economics at Queen’s University under the supervision of Professor James Bergin. My dissertation focused on network economics and university funding policies. I also conducted other theoretical research on taxation with Professor Jean-Denis Garon (UQÀM) and Louis Perrault (DPB). Both are graduates of Queen’s University.

After completing my Ph.D., I did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), an organization affiliated with Columbia University (New York) and the University of Cambridge (Cambridge), among others. I also worked for the federal government as a researcher. There, I discovered the challenges of working on real-world policies, which are sometimes far removed from the considerations of economic theory. I received four awards during that time, including one for public policy design and another as “Innovator of the Year.”

While I was working for the federal government, I taught at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. I mainly taught public economics and operations research. For those unfamiliar with these fields, public economics is the economic theory of government intervention, and operations research is a set of mathematical techniques related to business optimization.

It was my knowledge of the government sector and my background in economics that led me to become a professor of public finance at the Québec School of Public Administration (ÉNAP). ÉNAP is a small graduate school that is part of Université du Québec. Its mission is to train the civil servants of tomorrow. I work in academia as well as in the private and public sectors. At the university, I teach and conduct research in public economics and quantitative methods. I also work on concrete public policy reforms for various public and government agencies.

Last update: 2021-05-23.