3 minute read
UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION IN A TRULY INTERNATIONAL FACULTY
The new academic year kicked off with good news. KU Leuven rises to 43ste place in the 2025 Times Higher Education World University Ranking. With a score of 77.0, our university reinforces its leading position as the best in Belgium. According to THE, KU Leuven excels in the ‘industry’ section where it achieves a perfect score of 100. This result reflects its intensive collaboration with companies and its leadership in knowledge transfer and innovation.
Further notable is the systematic improvement in the score on ‘International outlook’. This increased from 71.8 in 2020 to 80.6 today. Determinants in this score are the share of international students and staff and the extent of international collaborations. With this growth, KU Leuven is well on its way to becoming the ‘truly international’ university it aspires to be.
Cooperation with industry and international outlook are not coincidentally also the strongholds of our faculty. In this international edition of our magazine, you will discover striking examples and interesting cases. Take applied scientific and technological research on our campuses. Whether it concerns circular battery recycling, green chemistry, tissue engineering, food digestion simulation or mobile surgical collaboration, geopolymers as an ecological alternative to cement or thin-film electronics for flexible chip design, each time companies are involved, and the validation of the research focuses on industrial applications. In this issue, several alumni also testify how the contacts with the field during their education have contributed to their success as engineers and entrepreneurs.
In recent months, our faculty has also been prominent on the international stage. The students of the Solar Team and Formula Electric Belgium excelled with a home-made racing car in international competitions in South Africa, Germany, Czech Republic and Croatia where they successfully competed against the best student team in the world. Tiësto ‘T Jolle and his team won Huawei’s European Seeds for the Future and will go to the world finals in Shenzhen (China) in January. And young alumnus Willem van de Mierop won the prestigious Appel Design Award 2024. Furthermore, numerous exchange students swarmed from all over the world. And the Ghent Campus has just launched a European project in which knowledge is exchanged on sustainable energy with five universities in Southern and Eastern Europe. The highlight of our international activity was the signing of the cooperation agreement with the City of Hong Kong University, not coincidentally the most international university in the world.
Rector Luc Sels called the rise in the Times Higher Education Ranking an important recognition of KU Leuven’s drive for innovation and internationalisation. The score also confirms the value of collaboration with industry. In both cases, it strengthens our position as one of the leading universities in Europe.
We are happy and proud that our faculty and its campuses have contributed to this achievement. At the same time, it is also a call and an incentive to further develop cooperation with companies and internationalisation without delay.
