A research-intensive and socially engaged university in the heart of Europe
Founded in 1425, UCLouvain is one of Europe’s oldest universities and the leading French-speaking institution in Belgium. With nearly 40,000 students and 6,000 staff across eight campuses in Wallonia and Brussels, it combines academic excellence, innovation, and a strong commitment to society.
UCLouvain invests €285 million annually in research and coordinates more than 400 EU-funded projects, fostering close partnerships with industry through two science parks hosting over 270 companies. Deeply international, one in five students and nearly half of its researchers come from abroad, reflecting UCLouvain’s openness and global outlook.
UCLouvain and Circle U.
As a founding member of Circle U., UCLouvain contributes actively to transforming European higher education. It leads two alliance platforms:
- CU.til, dedicated to teaching innovation,
- and CU.mil, focused on multilingualism and interculturality.
Through Circle U., UCLouvain fosters collaboration, creativity, and new learning opportunities, helping to build an open, inclusive, and sustainable European University.
Latest events at UCLouvain
CU.til Week: Innovate Your Teaching with Us!
Circle U. Model United Nations on Artificial Intelligence
Women Founders Network hackathon and community building
Staff Week on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I)
Courses from UCLouvain
Open Conversation — Breaking Silos in Language Education
PReCISE Summer School – Promoting Citizen Science Expertise
Open Conversation: Confronting poverty – how interdisciplinary collaboration can offer new routes to fight poverty
Open Conversation: The Power of Teacher Collaboration
Open Conversation: Pesticides, Health, and the Fight for Freedom of Speech
Mixed Methods in Applied Linguistics Research
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation: Uncovering Taboos
Meet the Circle U. team at UCLouvain
At UCLouvain, a dedicated 12-member administrative team coordinates Circle U. activities and supports the university community in developing and implementing European projects within the alliance. Do you have a question about Circle U.? Get in touch with our team: infocircleu@uclouvain.be
Management Board Member
Hervé Jeanmart
- Pro-Rector for International Affairs
- Member of the Circle U. Management Board
Hervé Jeanmart
- Pro-Rector for International Affairs
- Member of the Circle U. Management Board
Academic Chairs
Pietro Coletti
- Academic Chair
- Global Health KH
Pietro Coletti
- Academic Chair
- Global Health KH
Professor at the Faculty of Public Health and researcher at the Institute of Health and Society (IRSS).
Pietro Coletti joined UCLouvain as an assistant professor in September 2024. He conducts research at the Institute of Health and Society (IRSS) and teaches at the Faculty of Public Health. A computational epidemiologist specializing in infectious disease modeling, he focuses particularly on the impacts of climate change on public health.
Barbara De Cock
- Academic Chair
- Democracy KH
Barbara De Cock
- Academic Chair
- Democracy KH
Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Arts and Letters and member of the Institute for Language and Communication.
Barbara De Cock holds an MA both in Linguistics and Literature, and in European Studies, and a PhD in Spanish linguistics (KULeuven), and is currently professor of Spanish linguistics at UCLouvain. Her research concerns a wide variety of political and societal discourses, which directly or indirectly play a role in democratic decision-making and which point at the challenges for ensuring an adequate representation of the diversity present in society. This includes work on the discourse by politicians on Twitter, (online) activism concerning sustainability and patient rights, hatespeech, discourses on human rights abuses, discourse on populism and on the pandemic.
Yves Delville
- Academic Chair
- Artificial Intelligence KH
Yves Delville
- Academic Chair
- Artificial Intelligence KH
Professor at the Louvain School of Engineering and member of the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics.
Yves Deville is a professor at UCLouvain. His teaching and research focus on computer science, artificial intelligence and optimisation. He is a member of the Louvain School of Engineering and the ICTEAM research institute (Institute for Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics). For 10 years, he was Advisor to the Rector for the Digital University. He is now in charge of Artificial Intelligence at UCLouvain.
Clément Fontan
- Academic Chair
- Democracy KH
Clément Fontan
- Academic Chair
- Democracy KH
Professor at the Faculty of Economics, Social, Political and Communication Sciences.
Clément Fontan is professor of European economic policy at UCLouvain. His fields of
specialisation are political economy, European studies, financial ethics, central banks
and financial crises. He is the author of numerous publications in scientific journals in
French and English and co-author of the book "Do Central Banks serve the People"
(Polity, 2018), translated into French (ed. Raisons d'agir, 2019). He regularly
disseminates the results of his research in English speaking media such as Social
Europe or Euractiv.
Benoit Macq
- Academic Chair
- Incu.bator
Benoit Macq
- Academic Chair
- Incu.bator
Professor at the Louvain School of Engineering and member of the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics.
Civil electrical engineer and Doctor of Applied Sciences, Benoit Macq is a professor at UCLouvain’s Louvain School of Engineering. Director of the Technology and Society Class at the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, he explores the potential of imaging in multimedia, medical, and cinematic applications, while contributing to digital strategies in the Walloon Region in Belgium.
Fanny Meunier
- Academic Chair
- Academic Director CU.mil
Fanny Meunier
- Academic Chair
- Academic Director CU.mil
Professor of English language, linguistics, and teacher education Faculty of Philosophy, Arts and Letters.
Fanny Meunier is Professor of English language, linguistics, and teacher education at UCLouvain. Her research interests and publications cover fundamental, applied, and instructed Second Language Acquisition. She is also actively involved in pre- and in- service teacher education where she promotes teacher-researcher collaboration. She
has been involved in numerous international research projects. Her most recent projects deal with multi- and plurilingualism in the digital era; she is for instance actively involved in the ‘Language in the Human Machine Era’ project. She is the Academic Director of Circle U’s Multilingualism, Interculturality and Language Lab (CU.mil).
Ferran Suner Munoz
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair CU.mil
Ferran Suner Munoz
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair CU.mil
Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Arts and Letters and member of the Institute for Language and Communication/Linguistics Research.
Ferran Suñer is professor of German language, linguistics and teacher education at UCLouvain. His research interests cover technology-based language learning, applied cognitive linguistics, and the use of figurative language across languages and cultures. His recent projects involve collaboration among different stakeholders in the realms of research and education, focusing on initiatives such as Teaching and learning languages online using digital tasks and Learning scenarios to support inclusive language and culture education for heterogeneous school classes. He is a co-founder of the research group Teaching and Acquiring Multilingualism and Multiliteracies (TeAMM).
Jean-François Rees
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair CU.til
Jean-François Rees
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair CU.til
Professor at the Faculty of Sciences and member of the Louvain Institute of Biomolecular Science and Technology and of the Earth and Life Institute.
Professor and researcher in marine biology at UCLouvain, Jean-François Rees is passionate about pedagogical innovation and science communication. He has developed several learning tools, including Concept Maps for Assessment (CCàT) and the TOCCàTA platform, tested with thousands of students and yielding highly positive results.
Anne-Lise Sibony
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair Open Campus
Anne-Lise Sibony
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair Open Campus
Anne-Lise Sibony is a professor of European Law at the UCLouvain (Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium). Her scholarship spans several areas of European law: competition law, internal market, and consumer law. Anne-Lise’s main research interest is how law incorporates insights from other social sciences (eco-nomics, behavioural science). Currently, she focuses on EU consumer protection and EU behavioural lawmaking.
Anne-Lise is from Paris, where she read economics (Paris I) and law (Paris II). She is an alumna from École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and the London School of Economics (London), where studied Regulation. She has been a guest professor at Paris II and KULeuven.
Marnik Vanclooster
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair Climate Knowledge Hub
Marnik Vanclooster
- Academic Chair
- Academic Chair Climate Knowledge Hub
Dr. Marnik Vanclooster is professor at UCLouvain. He made his Ph.D. in soil physics and develops research projects in the area of water resources engineering, agricultural water management and vadose zone hydrology. He has 30 years of experience in executing and leading research projects at the national level, at the EU level and elsewhere (in particular the Maghreb and central Africa). He is head of the Earth and Life Institute at UCLouvain. He was elected chair of the Vadose Zone Division at EGU (2011-2013) and of the Belgian commission for the UNESCO – IHP (2013-2016). He is past member of the editorial board of the ‘Journal of Hydrology’ and the ‘Vadose Zone Journal’, and currently serves the editorial board of ‘Agricultural Water Management’ and ‘Hydrology and Earth Sciences Systems Journal (HESS)’.
