Before that, Laurent was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University where he collaborated with Jennifer Rexford during two years. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Louvain in Belgium in 2012. Laurent has won several awards for his research including: the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award (runner-up); the University of Louvain Best Thesis Award; the best paper award at the International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP); and two IETF Applied Networking Research Prizes for his works on inter-domain routing.