Born in 1971, Nicolas Roussel holds a PhD and an accreditation to supervise research in computer science from the Université Paris-Sud. He was senior lecturer there from 2001 until 2009, when he joined Inria Lille as research director at the Inria Lille - Nord Europe centre. His research lies in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Together with electronics engineers, automation systems engineers, psychologists, sociologists and designers, he has worked on subjects such as mediated communication, interactive systems engineering, graphic interaction, touch and gesture-based interaction and brain-computer interfaces.

His research findings have been presented at international conferences such as ACM CHI, ACM UIST, ACM CSCW and ACM Multimedia, where he also served as an organiser or member of the programme committee. He has also co-organised, in Lille, four editions of the Forum on Tactile and Gestural Interaction (FITG) and an Inria-Industry Meeting on the theme "Interaction with digital objects and services".

He participated in the creation of two Inria project teams (In-Situ, in Saclay, then Mint in Lille) before becoming head of the Mjolnir team at the Inria Lille - Nord Europe centre. Between June 2013 and July 2017, he was deputy scientific officer then scientific officer of this centre.

A member of the board of directors of the French Association of Human-Computer Interaction (AFIHM) from 2001 to 2003, then from 2009 to 2013, he has been a member of the scientific council of the "Retail Industry" competitiveness cluster (PICOM) since March 2014.