Karel Van Acker

Karel Van Acker is coordinator of the Leuven Materials Research Centre at KU Leuven and professor in sustainable materials and processes. He chairs the Flemish Transition Network on Sustainable Materials Management and the policy research centre SuMMa and is involved in numerous projects on landfill mining, valorisation of residues, biobased materials and sustainability assessments. He graduated as M.Sc. in materials engineering and obtained a PhD degree in materials science, both from KU Leuven. After his PhD, he worked during several years in the industry as manager of a materials and mechanical testing laboratory. From 1998 until 2005, Karel was project manager at VITO (Flemish Institute for Technological Research), where he was responsible for the materials characterisation section, and coordinator of several national and international projects in the field of durability of materials. He joined KU Leuven at the end of 2005.