Rector

Vincent Blondel has been rector of the Université catholique de Louvain since 1 September 2014. His Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy, Master’s Degree in Civil Engineering and Doctorate in Applied Mathematics—all earned at UCL—are a testament to his multidisciplinary educational approach. He completed a research internship at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Grenoble (France), earned a Master of Science in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London, and carried out postdoctorates in Oxford, Stockholm and Paris. He has been a professor at UCL since 1999, having previously taught at the Université de Liège. He has been an MIT Visiting Professor twice, and a Fulbright Scholar.

He has collaborated on many interdisciplinary projects at UCL. As a member of the Culture Committee, he established the cross-faculty minor in culture and creation, and helped establish the Artist in Residence programme. He sat on the Strategic Committee on UCL Attractiveness, the jury of the Cultural Development Fund, and the Biéreau Farm Board of Directors. He presided over the Department of Mathematical Engineering and headed the MOOCs Management Committee, of which he was the primary initiator. Of particular note, he led UCL to join edX consortium, which offers online courses to millions of students worldwide. As a student in Louvain-la-Neuve, he lived in one of UCL’s project-based student flats, the so-called ‘kots-à-projet’, where he led the project Ingénieurs sans frontières (‘Engineers without borders’).

His research lies at the interface of mathematics and information technology. With his colleagues, he established a research group that became widely recognised. He has published more than 200 articles and supervised over 30 theses and postdoctorates. He has been invited to work with many universities, including Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge. The high quality of his research has been recognised in the form of many prizes, several research grants, UCL Special Research Fund and Joint Research Action contracts, funding to implement both a ‘European Network of Excellence’ and a network via the European Science Foundation, and many industry contracts. He coordinated the Interuniversity Research Funding Programme and its more than 200 researchers. > En savoir plus

Vincent Blondel, 49, is married with four children. Born in Antwerp, he spent his childhood in Hainaut, his adolescence in Brussels and his early career in Liège. He lives in a village in the Brabant countryside.