Members

Dr. Philippe Claeys is a planetary scientist, geologist and geochemist working on the consequences of asteroid and comet impacts on the evolution of the bio-geosphere, such as mass extinction of organisms, or large scale global climatic changes. In 1993, he obtained a PhD from the University of California at Davis and for a few years carried out postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley.

Before joining the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001 as a professor, he held a position of senior scientist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. He currently heads the research unit Earth System Sciences and teaches geology at the VUB; he is also a visiting professor at the Ghent University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and University of Liège.

He is currently president of Geologica Belgica, the Belgian Geological Society and the author of numerous scientific publications including several in Nature and Science. When he is not traveling the world looking for clues to better understand the 4.5 billion years of evolution of planet Earth, he enjoys working in the lab with PhD students and colleagues on project ranging from astrobiology to geoarcheology.

Webpage : Dr Ph. Claeys Webpage

Kevin De Bondt has a masters degree in Geology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, 2005) and a specialization in Natural Hasard management from the Université de Liège. He is currently a PhD student at the VUB working on flood mitigation in urban environments, river restoration and rainwater infiltration.

Since March 2008, many projects have been already developed in these domains on the Brussels Region. He is now carrying out research on the urban water fluxes with a new project “Forgotten connection between urban water fluxes: coupled geological, historical and isotopic approaches towards a sustainable development of Brussels”.

Webpage : Kevin De Bondt Webpage

Dr. Guido Petrucci is an environmental engineer and urban hydrologist working on stormwater management in urban areas. After a double degree in engineering (Politecnico di Milano and Ecole Centrale Paris) he obtained in 2012 a PhD in Urban Planning at Université Paris-Est.

In his thesis he realized an interdisciplinary study of the current regulatory practices of decentralized stormwater management, by crossing public policy analysis with hydrological modeling of urban catchments. This work resulted in publications in international scientific journals and in a broad interest by local authorities of the Paris region. He also collaborated to several projects on urban runoff pollution and on the calibration of hydrological models.

He joined the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2014 as a post-doc researcher to study the hydrological services provided by the Soignes forest and by the green areas of the Brussels Capital Region.

Webpage : Guido Petrucci publications on Google Scholar