Face of Flanders
In a week that saw the Alzheimer’s researcher Christine Van Broeckhoven win a top international scientific award, another Flemish scientist, Conny Aerts, was similarly being feted. Aerts won the prestigious Francqui Prize, awarded annually in recognition of the achievements of a Belgian scholar or scientist under the age of 50.
Conny Aerts
Professor Aerts works at the University of Leuven and spends her professional life, as Oscar Wilde said, looking at the stars. In particular the vibrations of stars, or their oscillations, which provides information on the construction of the star and how its composition evolves over time.
It also allows the team she leads to determine the age of any given star, which are many thousands of years older now than when the light we are seeing left them.
Aerts was born in Brasschaat, Antwerp province, in 1966 and even as a child showed an interest in astronomy. She studied in Antwerp, moving to Leuven to do a doctorate, which led her to take part in missions to see telescopes in Provence and Chile.
Since then she has worked closely with the European Space Agency on data from “variable stars” – some of whose oscillations take a period of days – as well as chairing the working group of the International Astronomical Union. As well as a professor at Leuven, she is also an honorary fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK and a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Francqui Prize, set up in 1933, is worth €250,000 and will officially be handed over on 13 June. Professor Aerts will then join the esteemed ranks of Francqui Prize winners such as Big Bang thinker Georges Lemaitre, Nobel laureates Ilya Prigogine and Christian De Duve and federal minister Paul Magnette (a political scientist).
The last time a woman won the prize was in 2004, when it went to anthropologist Marie-Claire Foblets, also of the University of Leuven. The time before that was never.
