Pierre Côté

Pierre Côté is President of CÔTÉ Membrane Separation Ltd.

Dr. Côté is well known for his role as the principal inventor of the ZeeWeed® immersed membrane commercialized by ZENON Environmental Inc. (now part of GE Power & Water) and currently the most broadly used filtration membrane in the world for applications such as drinking water production, wastewater treatment, water reuse and desalination. In 2000, Dr. Côté won the $100,000 Manning Principal Award for the ZeeWeed® technology; the award was shared with his co-workers and employees at ZENON. The following year, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

After his notable work with ZENON, Dr. Côté served as Research Programme Director with Compagnie Générale des Eaux from 1992 to 1998, the world’s largest private water company, now called Veolia Environnement. In this capacity he led the team that won a French Academy of Sciences prize for a project on nanofiltration in 1995. In 1998, Dr. Côté returned to Canada and to ZENON as Chief Technology Officer, where the commercialization of ZeeWeed® was starting to take off. Following this, Dr. Côté served as Chief Technology Officer for Vaperma from 2006 to 2009, a company engaged in the development of separation solutions for biofuels and industrial gases.

Dr. Côté studied Civil Engineering at l’École Polytechnique in Montréal and he obtained a B.Eng. and a M.Sc. (Applied). In 1979, he took a position as Research Engineer with Environment Canada and started a part-time PhD at McMaster University. He obtained his PhD in 1986 successfully defending his thesis on hazardous waste stabilization. Over the 25 years of his R&D career, Dr. Côté has authored some 100 technical publications and obtained more than 50 patents.

---