Vincent Blondel - Biography#
Vincent D. Blondel is a Belgian professor of applied mathematics at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blondel's research lies in the area of mathematical control theory and theoretical computer science. He is best known for his contributions in network science, computational complexity in control, multi-agent coordination and complex networks.
He studied philosophy, mathematics, engineering and computer science in Louvain-la-Neuve, Grenoble, London and Oxford. He completed a master thesis in engineering at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, he holds a MSc in mathematics from Imperial College of Science and Technology and a degree in philosophy, a master's degree in engineering (summa cum laude) and a PhD in applied mathematics from Université catholique de Louvain.
At UCL, Blondel has founded the Group on Large Graphs and Networks that performs research on the most recent and fundamental computational challenges raised by large networks. The research activity is concentrated on questions related to the classification, equilibria calculation, visualization, and stochastic analysis of large networks. It addresses both theoretical and practical aspects of topics such as data-mining of text documents, web-searching, analysis of telephone, traffic and electricity networks, hierarchical reduction of large scale networks, and analysis of dynamical properties of large networks. He has supervised 20 doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and 15 visiting professors. He was department head in 2003-2010.
In 2013, he has become the dean of the Louvain School of Engineering. He was elected the Rector of the Université catholique de Louvain for the term 2014 - 2019. He is currently chairman of The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities.
His recent work on networks has been widely featured, including in Wired, Technology Review, Le Monde, La Recherche, Der Spiegel, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
https://perso.uclouvain.be/vincent.blondel/media/index.html
