On proposal of the Universities, the Francqui Foundation attributes each year some Francqui Chairs. 

For academic year 2020-2021, the Faculty of Applied Engineering awarded a Francqui Chair. This honor went to prof. dr. ir. Jo Dewulf. Promoter for this Chair is prof. dr. ir. Pieter Billen.

The Faculty was pleased to organize the inaugural lecture on 21 April 2021 and following the lecture series.

Jo Dewulf

Jo Dewulf (°1969) works with the Department of Green Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Belgium. He leads the Sustainable Systems Engineering group (STEN) and focuses on clean production with a team that consists at the moment of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and master students.

After his engineering studies (maxima cum laude, 1992) and PhD (maxima cum laude, 1997) at Ghent University and post-doc research both at Ghent University and Delft University of Technology, he became assistant professor (2003), associate professor (2007) and full professor (2012) Clean Technology at Ghent University. He was on leave for two years from his full professor position to join the European Commission – Joint Research Centre, Ispra (Italy), as senior scientist in the Sustainability Assessment Unit (2013-2015). He was guest professor at ETH Zürich with the Ecological Systems Design group (2019-2020). For his scientific work, he obtained the prize of the laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in 2008.

In his research, he heavily focuses on clean technology, i.e. searching for preventive actions within production processes and values chains. To do so, he makes thorough analyses at the process, plant and overall industrial system level, based on life cycle thinking and thermodynamic principles in order to find out opportunities for improvement.

Apart from methodological improvements, implementations and collaborations with industrial partners have been put in practice in three areas: fine chemicals and pharma, agro/bio/food, and secondary and primary raw materials. Work has been done with institutions, e.g. EU KIC EIT Raw Materials, EC-DG JRC, Flanders public materials management authority OVAM ... Also with individual firms, research has been undertaken, e.g. with Johnson&Johnson-Janssen Pharmaceutica, Oleon, Organic Waste Systems, Syral, Indaver, Umicore, Solvay, Deme, Engie, Arcelor and others. His team is also partner of the Flemish Policy Research Center on Sustainable Materials Management ‘Circular Economy’, in several spearhead cluster projects (Catalisti, Flanders’ Food, Blue Cluster). He has been coordinator, work package leader or partner in several projects within the Horizon 2020 programme (RePair, Glopack, C123, INCITE, Orienting, Circular Foodpack …), EU KIC EIT Raw materials (SUPRIM, PANORAMA …).

Since his involvement with the European Commission, he further concentrates on the sustainable use of natural resources, e.g. resource efficiency, resource criticality, integrated sustainability assessment, and use of secondary resources. He is chairman of the European VinylPlus monitoring committee, and member of the OG EIP Raw Materials (EC) and of the International Roundtable on Criticality. The work has been also oriented towards southern countries, with finished and running MSc and PhD projects in collaboration with Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Vietnam...

His work is visible on the international scene, with about 300 peer reviewed papers in international journals. He assisted to several international conference organisations and international journals, e.g. serving at the RCR editorial board. In 2016, the second Wiley book he edited was published: "Sustainability Assessment of Renewables-Based Products: Methods and Case Studies".

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