I obtained my PhD in Operations Research (OR) in 2003 from KU Leuven (Belgium), and I am currently full professor of OR at the Faculty of Economics and Business  of the same university.  I am the chairman of the university-wide Advisory Committee for the Chinese Region of KU Leuven. From 2017 until 2025, I was program director of the Business Engineering programs (for all campuses, covering around 2000 students). My main research interests are in sequencing and scheduling, combinatorial optimization, and decision making under uncertainty.

More broadly, my research domains are operations research and operations management. Working in a faculty of economics and management, I always try to keep an eye on managerial applications of the developed models (mainly in project management, production planning, and logistics), but there are clear overlaps of my research with the fields of industrial engineering, computer science, and discrete mathematics.

My PhD in 2003 was on a subject related to uncertainty handling in project management and scheduling. Until 2005, my research was more informal and related to project management. From 2005 onwards, I started to focus on the more technical aspects of project scheduling and decision making under uncertainty. After 2010, my interest has gradually shifted towards more basic (machine) scheduling and other combinatorial optimization problems, although project planning continues to play an important role in some of my research. Simultaneously, in terms of solution methods, I have also moved from manually coded “dedicated” solution procedures towards more generic mathematical-programming-based methods (such as branch-and-price and branch-and-cut).