Karen DeClerk

Prof. Karen De Clerck, Full Professor at Ghent University, is an expert in advanced fibrous materials, focusing on their characterization, production, and sustainable applications. She is a promotor of the AIDesignTex-project.

Prof. Karen De Clerck obtained her PhD in Materials Science (Textiles) in 2002 at Ghent University. She continued her academic career at Ghent University, first as a post-doc researcher and since 2007 she combined this with a part-time Assistant Professor position. Since 2013 she holds a full-time Associate Professor position and from 2018 onwards she was promoted to the rank of Full Professor. Karen De Clerck is an expert in advanced fibrous materials. Expertise was built on fibre material characterization, production and modification towards advanced applications such as sensors, filtration, separation, composites, etc. via an interdisciplinary approach. The key expertise of her research group is centred around fibre materials but this is made scientifically more interesting and challenging by involving collaborations with polymer synthesis, polymer processing groups as well as research groups that help to exploit the fibre materials towards advanced application of societal and economic value such as water purification and regeneration, novel composite materials, fibrous smart sensor materials, biomedical materials, and the design of more sustainable fibre materials. As a summary of her scientific output it is worthwhile to mention she is author of about 150 A1 publications in mainly first quartile ranked and mostly top 5% or top 10% ranked journals and more than 150 conference contributions, including P1, C1 and C3. Important to mention are publications in journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Advanced Functional Materials, Science Advances with numerous cover highlighted manuscripts.