About
Tom Lenaerts
... is a Belgian academic and researcher. He is Full professor (professeur ordinaire/gewoon hoogleraar) in the Computer Science Department of the Faculty of Sciences at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
He acts as co-head of the Machine Learning group and Academic Director of FARI, the AI for the common good institute of the ULB and VUB located in the center of Brussels. He is also member of the scientific committee of TRAIL - Trustworthy AI labs organised in the Walloon region of Belgium and national contact point for the CAIRNE hub in Brussels. He is also partially affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley.
He is member of ELLIS, the pan-European AI network of excellence, BNVKI and EurAI, the Benelux and European Associations of AI, AAAI, the American Association of AI, and ISCB, the International Society for Computational Biology.
He serves as President of the Bachelor jury of the ULB Computer Science Department and ERASMUS coordinator.
Phd
He obtained his PhD from the Computer Science department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) while being part of the Adaptive Systems group (headed by Bernard Manderick), which later became the Computational Modelling lab and finally merged into the AI lab. Following his PhD he was postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et Intelligence Artificielle (IRIDIA) in the engineering faculty of the ULB and the Switch lab of VIB, the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB).
Scientific work
He has been publishing in a variety of interdisciplinary domains on AI and Machine Learning, involving topics related to optimization, multi-agent systems, collective intelligence, evolutionary game theory, computational biology and bioinformatics.
His work has appeared in leading journals such as Nature Communication, Nature Methods, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci USA, PLoS Computational Biology, Physical Review Letters, Proc. Royal Society Interface, Artificial Intelligence Journal, Journal of AI Research, among other venues, as well as in major computer science conferences including ICML, AAAI, AAMAS, and IJCAI.
All information concerning publications is available on either the university websites;
- ULB Di-fusion
- VUB Pure
Or public websites like
- ORCID
- SCOPUS
- Google scholar
- DBLP
Other activities
He was one of the founders of two interuniversity institutes between ULB and VUB; the Interuniversity Institute of Bioinformatics in Brussels (Ibsquare) and FARI, the AI for common good institute. Between 2017 and 2021, he was Director of IBsquare and since January 2025 he became Academic Director of FARI.
He is one of the founders of the TRAIL Institute (Trustworthy AI labs) in the Walloon region, which is supported until 2027 by SPW Digitalwallonia4.ai. Since end 2024, he became responsible for the Human-AI interaction part of the project.
He was also board member, Vice-Chair and Chair of the Benelux AI association (BNVKI) from 2016 to 2021 and expert in the Global Partnership in AI between 2022 and 2025, which is now integrated in the OECD.
He was (vice-)president of the ULB Computer Science Department between 2016 and 2021, and once more in 2023.
Contact
Email ; Tom.Lenaerts [ at ] ulb.be or Tom.Lenaerts [ at ] vub.be
Address;
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Département d'Informatique
Boulevard du Triomphe CP212
1050 Brussels
Belgium
