Lirias

Chinese cities are struggling with citizens who fail to sort their household waste and have implemented policies to incentivize and motivate their citizens. In waste-related public services, citizens are no longer passive recipients but active co-producers and co-creators. I put forward a research question: What incentivizes and motivates co-production and co-creation in waste-related public serv…

Whereas the Flemish sewer system was once valued as an innovation for human health, it is increasingly criticised as a source of pollution and environmental damage caused by sewer overflows. Flemish sewers are now ageing, with some even dating back to the period of their original construction. As a result of the climate crisis and unexpected population growth, this system is under severe pressure…

Around 1990, Vladimir Berkovich constructed powerful foundations for analytic geometry over non-archimedean fields, such as p-adic fields and fields of Laurent series. This theory has found a broad range of applications in number theory, algebraic geometry and dynamical systems. The aim of the project is to better understand norms on pluricannocial forms on Berkovich spaces such as the weight nor…

The focus of recent sustainable strategies in architecture has shifted towards a circular building economy. This has become one of the main topics in the construction sector. The aim is to reduce the global consumption of raw materials and to limit waste production. Applied to the building industry, this approach considers the building as a 'database' of materials—a temporary stock of elements th…

As a cardinal symptom of most functional gastrointestinal disorders, visceral pain and discomfort are very common and disabling. Unfortunately, such symptoms remain poorly understood and are hard to treat. There is a general consensus that fear towards gastrointestinal sensations may play an important role, but the mechanisms underlying such fear as well as its impact on visceral symptom percepti…

Long-term survival after lung transplantation remains poor compared with other solid organ transplants, with a five-year survival rate of only 54%. This limited survival is largely attributable to the development of chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD), also referred to as chronic lung rejection, which affects approximately 50% of patients within five years after transplantation. CLAD compri…

MPC is a primitive which allows for mutually distrusting parties to jointly compute the output of a function over their private inputs. This technology has many practical applications and, as such, has seen extensive research, which has generated several different methods for achieving MPC. In this thesis, we discuss and expand on three of the best known methods for achieving MPC. The first is ba…

Despite growing interest in digital self-monitoring tools for mental health and care, the field continues to struggle with translating technological potential into meaningful and sustainable clinical implementation. A central reason for this is the limited understanding of how these tools should be designed and implemented to provide genuine value for people with mental health problems and their …

Recently, metal oxides have attracted great attention as materials for electrochemical biosensors due to their low cost, functional biocompatibility, excellent chemical stability in biofluids and easy anchoring of biorecognition molecules. Drawbacks limiting their practical use in devices are the low conductivity and electron transfer kinetics. Nanostructural forms of metal oxides could overcome …

Wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) has emerged as a promising technology for producing large-scale components because of its high deposition rate, efficient material utilisation, design flexibility, and comparatively low equipment cost. These advantages make WAAM particularly attractive for structural applications in which conventional manufacturing routes may involve substantial material was…

On-orbit servicing and active debris removal missions depend on rendezvous and proximity operations in which a chaser spacecraft must maneuver in close proximity to a target or dock with it. Autonomous operation around an uncooperative target requires monocular vision-based estimation of the target's 6D pose, i.e., position and orientation, relative to the chaser. Recent data-driven approaches sh…

Emotions play a pivotal role in interpersonal functioning, expressing individuals' values and objectives in the social world. When emotional experiences align—between individuals or between a person and their cultural environment—this alignment, termed emotional fit, is associated with more harmonious interactions and greater relational well-being. In migration contexts, immigrant minorities' emo…

The renewed Flemish curriculum for Catholic secondary religious education (RE) aims to give pupils the opportunity to clarify and articulate their own worldview in dialogue with the plural world and the Christian faith. The teacher has a crucial role to play in this. He/she is expected be a 'witness' who teaches from a lived Christian attitude, a specialist with expert knowledge on religions, and…

This research will focus on dynamic and experience-based pricing models. Rather than fixing a contract price at the start of the contract based on a set of 'static' covariates that are known prior to the contract, the contract can be adjusted to include a baseline price that is augmented by a variable price based on dynamic time-varying covariates that are observed during the contract. This is in…

This PhD research investigates reconfigurable resonant DC-DC converter architectures and design methodologies for electric vehicle DC fast-charging systems. The transition from 400 V vehicle platforms to 800 V and future kilovolt-class powertrains creates stringent requirements for converter voltage compatibility, power scalability, semiconductor voltage stress, efficiency, and design robustness.…

Neuropsychiatric disorders can affect emotional processes, including a decreased sense for interpreting the meaning of social signals, and be associated with lesions in areas of the emotional networks. However, the underlying neural mechanisms of these behavioral changes are still unknown. The aim of the project is to study the accompanying structural and functional changes in these pathological …

Proficiency Based Progression (PBP) training has already demonstrated its scientific added value in different fields of modern medicine. It leads to a reduction of 'performance errors' during surgical or non-surgical tasks. This doctoral thesis deals with the implementation of this new training methodology in teaching basic robotic surgery skills, comparing PBP training with the current standard …

Allogeneic Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (alloHSCT) patients have complex needs and can benefit from eHealth-facilitated integrated care models (ICM), such as the SMILe-ICM (SteM cell transplantation faciLitated by eHealth) which combines electronic symptom monitoring and support from an advanced practice nurse (APN). However, sustainable implementation of complex healthcare interventio…

Antibiotic resistance represents one of the most serious threats to global public health, as an increasing number of bacterial pathogens have evolved resistance to nearly all major classes of currently available antibiotics. This crisis underscores the urgent need for antibacterial agents with fundamentally new mechanisms of action. One promising but largely unexplored target is the bacterial Sec…

Screening for post-stroke neurocognitive disorders in a culturally diverse population in Suriname Low- and middle-income countries, including Suriname, account for 89 percent of the global stroke burden. Post-stroke neurocognitive disorders are a major contributor to this burden, underscoring early detection to guide rehabilitation. However, the validity of commonly used cognitive screening tools…