Born in Antwerp (Belgium) in 1965, Vincent Blondel is Rector of the University of Louvain (UCL). He holds a baccalauréat in philosophy, a degree in engineering and a PhD in applied mathematics (UCL), as well as an MSc from Imperial College, London. He has held postdoctoral fellowships in Oxford, Stockholm and Paris. He has been a professor at UCL since 1999 and has twice been a visiting professor at MIT, as well as a Fulbright Scholar.
In addition to The Guild, Vincent Blondel also chairs the Chamber of Universities of the Research and Higher Education Administration in the Federation Wallonia-Brussels, and he is Vice-President of the Council of Rectors of the French-Speaking Universities of Belgium (CRef).
Vincent Blondel has been Dean of the Louvain School of Engineering and Head of UCL’s Department of Mathematical Engineering. He brought UCL into the edX consortium, which offers online courses to millions of students across the world.
Vincent Blondel’s research is at the interface between mathematics and information technology. He has published over 200 articles and supervised some thirty theses and postdoctoral projects. He has been invited to speak at numerous institutions, including Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge. He has received numerous prizes and funding awards, including FSR and ARC research contracts (Belgium), European network of excellence funding, a European Science Foundation network grant and numerous industrial contracts. He has coordinated an Interuniversity Attraction Pole (Belgian federal funding) grouping together more than 200 Belgian and foreign researchers.