Joseph Octave Indekeu - Biography#
Joseph Octave Indekeu, who in 2013 was awarded a Belgian Academy Prize for Science Outreach, was Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at KU Leuven from 2011 until 2015 (http://www.fys.kuleuven.be
). This Department consists of 7 Research Units: Soft matter and biophysics, Nuclear physics and radiation, Semiconductor physics, Solid state physics and magnetism, Astronomy, Theoretical physics and Physics education. In the Department work 35 professors, 130 PhD students, 90 Postdocs, 50 administrative and technical staff. The Department has enjoyed an excellent research visitation in 2011 by an international panel of experts. While being actively involved, as a leader, in maintaining throughout his Department the highest standards of research, teaching and services to university and society, Joseph Octave Indekeu's personal activities are centered around research in theoretical statistical physics, with his team (http://www.itf.fys.kuleuven.be/~joi
), teaching general physics and quantum physics, and popularizing science by designing and performing in a physics cabaret, together with his children (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXWyIz0l7YBtqNvvieIo6FkAa5Yq-3L6V).Joseph Octave Indekeu's international profile is very well balanced and has enabled him to establish a network of colleagues and collaborators who aim at highly original and pioneering contributions to science. After postdoctoral years at MIT, TU Delft and RU Leiden, and shorter stays in Padova, Bristol and Oxford, he developed various seminal lines of research in wetting phenomena and interfacial critical phenomena. This has, in particular, led to a novel view on surface superconductivity, which has led to the prediction of an interface delocalization (or "wetting") phase transition in type-I superconductors. This prediction has recently been verified experimentally. Furthermore, in 2013 Indekeu co-investigated, with researchers of Imec, wetting states in nanopatterned silicon (published in ACS NANO), which has numerous applications since reliable wet cleaning of nanopatterned Si wafers is an extremely important issue in modern technology.
Full list of publications
