Global Challenges for a Sustainable Society

Nicole Van Lipzig

Full Professor at the Faculty of Science

KU Leuven

Nicole Van Lipzig heads the division of Geography and has lead Leuven Sustainable Earth, which is the expertise centre on sustainability research at KU Leuven. She is a world-leading geographer and earth system scientist particularly interested in climate impacts, climate extremes, wind energy, and urban and polar climate. In the past fifteen years, Prof. Van Lipzig coordinated fundamental research projects in Europe and Antarctica, and spearheaded research on land use change and urbanisation impacts on local climate in economically-developing regions in Subsaharan Africa. Besides fundamental research, she supports comprehensive initiatives on environmental sustainability and climate change, and provided more than 60 outreach presentations for stakeholders and the general public.

Bart Muys

Full Professor at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering

KU Leuven

Bart Muys is full professor of forest ecology & management at KU Leuven. His research is focusing on the functional significance of biodiversity for forest ecosystem services in a context of restoration and building resilience to climate change.

Koenraad Van Meerbeek

Associate Professor at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering

KU Leuven

Koenraad Van Meerbeek is associate professor within the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the KU Leuven. Leading the sGlobe lab, his primary objective is to develop global change-robust solutions that can effectively address the biodiversity crisis, one of the major challenges faced in the Anthropocene era. His research methodologies encompass various approaches such as fieldwork, long-term research platforms, drones, and computational modeling. Through the application of these techniques, his aim is to enhance our understanding of how global change impacts biodiversity and the functioning of natural ecosystems.

Olivier Honnay

Full Professor at the Faculty of Science

KU Leuven

Olivier Honnay is a bioscience engineer with a PhD in Plant Ecology, and he is currently professor of Conservation Biology and Agronomic Ecology at the Biology Department of KU Leuven. His research focuses on the effects of anthropogenic impacts such as nutrient enrichment, invasive species, climate change and habitat fragmentation on plant species, and on evaluating various ecological approaches that are used to support agricultural production and increase sustainability, both in Europe and in the Global South.

Gerard Govers

Full Professor at the Faculty of Science

KU Leuven

Gerard Govers is professor of geography and vice-rector of science, engineering and technology and sustainability at KU Leuven. He is fascinated by the relationship between the development of human civilisations and the environment. His research focuses on how humans impact the land surface of our planet through processes such as soil erosion, soil organic matter loss and water and sediment fluxes. He also teaches an introductory course on Global Environmental Change and its connection to the development of human societies.

Johan Driesen

Professor of Power Systems Engineering

KU Leuven

Johan Driesen received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium, in 1996 and 2000 on the finite element solution of coupled thermalelectromagnetic problems and related applications in electrical machines and drives, microsystems, and power-quality issues. In 2000–2001, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, U.K. In 2002, he was with the University of California, Berkeley. He is full professor at KU Leuven and expert in Energy Storage at EnergyVille. He conducts research on distributed generation, including renewable energy systems, power electronics and its applications (e.g., in drives, electric vehicles and smart grids).

Karel Van Acker

Full Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Science and the Faculty of Economics and Business

KU Leuven

Prof. dr. ir. Karel Van Acker is professor in Circular Economy at KU Leuven with a joint mandate at the department of Materials Engineering (faculty of Engineering Sciences) and at the Centre for Economics and Corporate Sustainability (faculty of Business and Economics). His research is on developing strategies to realize the circular economy (CE) and on sustainability assessments of these CE strategies, including amongst others recycling, materials substitution, sharing economy. Karel holds a PhD in Materials Science and has been for 12 years coordinator of the KU Leuven Materials Research Centre (>500 researchers). He also leads the policy research centre “Circular economy” for the Flemish government and currently is the chairman of the Sustainability Council of KU Leuven.

Joost Duflou

Full Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Science

KU Leuven

Joost Duflou is a full professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department of KU Leuven. He leads research groups focusing respectively on ecodesign and life cycle engineering, and on manufacturing process development. As overarching theme he has a strong interest in industrial symbiosis between manufacturing processes, where secondary output of one process category is used as input resource for another, with low impact manufacturing as final target.

Wim Dewulf

Full Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Technology

KU Leuven

Wim Dewulf received his Masters and PhD Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from KU Leuven in 1996 and 2003 respectively. He currently holds the position of Full Professor at KU Leuven where he serves as chair of Group T Leuven Campus, an international and entrepreneurial campus that focuses on Sustainable Engineering, Health Engineering and Enterprising Creativity. He is lecturing courses related to sustainability, manufacturing and materials technology; and is heading research groups on ‘life cycle engineering’ and on ‘manufacturing metrology’. He supervises/-ed more than 30 PhD students, participated in ca. 30 national and international research projects, and has published more than 300 international journal and conference publications. He has been elected fellow of CIRP, the International Academy of Production Engineering.

Tessa Avermaete

Project Manager at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering

KU Leuven

Tessa Avermaete is project manager at the Sustainable Food Economies Research Group (SFERE) of Leuven University. She manages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary consortia that are working in the domain of food security, sustainable food systems, agriculture and sustainable diets. She focuses on the European context, where the food system is characterized by a growing gap between consumers and producers, inequality, the prevalence of obesity, a polarized debate on sustainable food systems and a continuous decrease in the number of farmers. Tessa Avermaete was involved in the High Level Steering Board of the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI) and in the focus group on new entrants in farming.

She is member of diverse working groups at the national, regional and local level, contributing to an evidence-based transition of the food system and empowerment of all the actors in the system. She was nominated for the science battle for her work in reaching out current insights on food and farming to children.

Barbara De Coninck

Associate Professor at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering

KU Leuven

Barbara De Coninck, who earned her PhD in Plant Biology in 2007, embarked on her career as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Microbial and Plant Genetics (KU Leuven, Belgium) under the guidance of Prof. Cammue. During her time there, she delved into studying the interplay between pathogens and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, with a specific focus on stress-induced peptides. In 2014, she broadened her research experience as a visiting scientist at the University of Queensland under Prof. Craik's laboratory and also at CSIRO Plant Industry with Prof. K. Kazan in Australia. After serving as a senior scientist at the VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology in Ghent for a year, she established her own research lab on Plant Health and Protection within the Department of Biosystems, at KU Leuven in 2016. Her research focuses on how horticultural crops interact with pathogens and beneficial microorganisms, aiming to advance the development of novel and innovative management strategies to tackle economically important diseases and to steer the development of tolerant varieties and the use of biocontrol organisms. Through education and science communication, she strives to inspire the next generation of scientists and cultivate a greater understanding of sustainable crop production.

Jan Van Bavel

Full Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences

KU Leuven

Jan Van Bavel is full professor of demography and sociology at the Centre for Sociological Research of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). His research has addressed the demographic transition, more particularly long term trends in fertility, family formation, and union dissolution, from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. In 2012, he obtained a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for a study on the implications of the reversal of the gender gap in education for family dynamics. In this project, he developed agent-based approaches to demographic issues. In 2018, he received the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship of the European University Institute and in 2019 he taught a Spring course on population history at UCLA in Los Angeles as the holder of the Antoon Van Dyck Chair. His current teaching includes a course on Population, Climate Change and Society, among others.

Karen Allacker

Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Science

KU Leuven

Karen Allacker has a Master in architectural engineering (KU Leuven, 2001) and a PhD in Engineering (KU Leuven, 2010). In 2013 she started as Assistant Professor at the KU Leuven, department of architecture within the faculty of Engineering science, holding the chair on Sustainable Architecture. Since October 2022, she is Professor at the same department and head of the research division Architectural Engineering. Her main area of expertise is environmental and economic assessment of the built environment from a life cycle thinking perspective. She has been involved in research projects on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) of construction products, buildings, city districts, cities and building stocks at macro-scale. Before she joint the KU Leuven, Prof. Allacker was scientific officer at the DG Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, where she contributed to the development of the Product and Organisation Environmental Footprint methods.

Pieter Vansteenwegen

Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Science

KU Leuven

Pieter Vansteenwegen is a professor at the Centre of Industrial Management, Traffic and Infrastructure at KU Leuven and chair of the KU Leuven Institute for Mobility (http://www.kuleuven.be/lim). He obtained his PhD in Operations Research at KU Leuven in 2008. His research focusses on the development of more robust public transportation services and the development of metaheuristics for solving complex logistic and public transportation planning problems. More information on projects and publications is available on https://www.mech.kuleuven.be/en/cib/pieter-vansteenwegen

Johan Eyckmans

Full Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business

KU Leuven

Johan Eyckmans is professor in environmental economics at the faculty of economics and business of KU Leuven. He studied economics at the University of Antwerp and at KU Leuven in Belgium. He was research fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders and in 1997 he obtained a Ph.D. at KU Leuven on the incentives of nations to form international environmental agreements. His research interests include the economics of climate change, applications of game theory to the formation of international environmental agreements, economics of waste and materials, circular economy, cost benefit analysis, general equilibrium and integrated assessment modeling, and evaluation of environmental policies.

Ides Nicaise

Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences

KU Leuven

Prof. em. Ides Nicaise (KU Leuven) has a PhD in economics and is senior research manager at HIVA (Research Institute for Work and Society). He specialised in social policy, more precisely the relationships between education, labour market policy and social inclusion (in rich as well as developing countries). At the Department of Education Sciences of his university, he taught the subjects ‘economics of education’, ‘lifelong learning and equal opportunities’ and ‘education and society’. Besides his professional activities, he is chairing the Belgian Combat Poverty Service.

Tim Smits

Full Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences

KU Leuven

Tim Smits is the current vice-dean of Education for the Faculty of Social Sciences, the former director of the Institute for Media Studies (2014-2019), and the former programme director of the Master in Corporate Communication (2014-2019). With a background in Social Psychology (MSc & PhD), Statistics (MSc), Marketing, Ethics and Communication, he now is a full professor in Persuasion and Marketing Communication.

Tim published on various topics within these fields, but his main research focus pertains to persuasion and marketing communication dynamics that involve health and/or consumer empowerment and how these are affected by situational differences or manipulations. He also has a more methodological line of research on science replicability.

Gert Storms

Full Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences

KU Leuven

Gert Storms is a psycholinguistics professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Leuven. His research interests include psychosemantics, psychological scaling and scientific misconduct. He is currently chairing the Flemish Commission for Research Integrity.

Geert Van Calster

Full Professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology

KU Leuven

Geert Van Calster is a full professor at Leuven University Law School and a visiting professor at Monash University, Melbourne, and King’s College, London. He is also a practising member of the Belgian Bar, and has been instructed in pivotal environmental and human rights cases in Belgium, England and The Netherlands. His fairly unique profile is that of combining in both his scholarship and practice, a solid know-how of international and European environmental law, with more technical areas of the law such as international litigation, conflict of laws, insolvency and economic law.

Katja Biedenkopf

Professor of Sustainability Politics at the Faculty of Social Sciences

KU Leuven

Prof. Dr. Katja Biedenkopf is a Professor of Sustainability Politics at the Leuven International and European Studies (LINES) research group (KU Leuven), of which she is the chair. She also leads the Sustainable Futures research group within LINES. Her academic research focuses on the external effects of European Union environmental and climate policy, carbon pricing policies, climate diplomacy, e-waste policy, and chemicals regulation. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project ‘Polycentric Carbon Pricing Governance’ (PolyCarbon), leads the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on EU External Action (EU ExAct), and is a work package leader in the Horizon Europe project ‘Transforming and Defending Multilateralism: EU Support for more Robust, Effective, and Democratic Global Governance’ (ENSURED). Prof. Biedenkopf teaches Global Environmental Policy, qualitative research methods, and international negotiation skills.