PHD Students & Postdoctoral Fellows

33 PhD theses have been granted under his direction, with brilliant careers in different areas:

• Academic careers. Vice-rector of the VUB (Viviane Jonckers), the academic head of the media department at MIT (Pattie Maes), various professors in prestigious universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK and Switzerland (Katrien Beuls, Bart de Boer, Walter Daelemans, Frederic Kaplan, Paul Vogt, Bart Janssen, Josefina Sierra).
• Research careers. Prestigious academic or industrial research labs, such as the Berkeley Neuroscience Institute (Tony Bell), Jet Propulsion labs (Didier Keymeulen), INRIA (Pierre-Yves Oudeyer), Sony Japan and France (Michael Spranger, Remi van Trijp), Microsoft Innovation (Holger Kenn),
• Science administration. Walter Van de Velde (Project officer European Commission, FET program.) and Jo De Cuypere (Director Van Overstraeten Foundation, Leuven)
• Companies. High level positions in various technology companies: Kris Van Marcke (Manager Ordina), Piet Spiessens (Director DNE Belgium), Sabine Geldof (Namahn), Joris van Looveren (Volvo), Simon Pauw (Aldebaran).
• Innovation and spin-off companies. Former students that had created their own companies:  Edwin de Jong (co-founder Adapticon), Pieter Wellens (co-founder APIC),  Aurelien Slodzian (co-founder Epure Management), Bart de Vylder (co-founder Anygma), Joachim de Beule (co-founder Engagor), project A ventures (Martin Loetzsch)

In addition, more than 20 post-docs have started their careers in the research environment created by Luc Steels: Nancy Chang (Google research, Mountain View), Andreas Birk (Jacobs University Robotics, Bremen), Miles Pebody (National Oceanographic Institute, underwater robotics), Francois Pachet (Sony Paris), Atau Tanaka (Goldsmiths London), Vanessa Micelli (SAP), Peter Beyls (Univ of Porto), Ludo Cuypers (founder COMmeto), etc.