News & announcements

Jeroen Van der Straeten received the fourth prize in the URSI Student Paper Prize Competition at the URSI General Assembly and Scientific Symposium in Krakow, Poland, held between 15 and 22 August 2026. The title of his work was "Comparing Quad Band Uniaxial and 5G Triaxial RF-EMF Exposure Sensors at 3.5 GHz". (Sept 2026)

Jirka Verleysen received a shared 4th place award for Best Student Presentation at the 19th Biennial Castle Meeting, an international conference focusing on rock, paleomagnetic and environmental magnetism held in Collonges-la-Rouge, France. The award recognizes the outstanding quality of her presentation entitled “MAGSCREEN: Shielding against the Earth's Magnetic Field: Experimental and Simulation-Based Evaluations of Materials Performance". (Aug. 2026)

Job Opening: Researcher for network modeling tool for Integrated planning of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks. Read more here. (July 2026)

Job Opening: Researcher for Digital Twin Mapping of 5G-6G dynamic electromagnetic field environments. Read more here. (July 2026)

On March 26th, imec-WAVES (Ghent University) organized the second PhD Forum featuring four inspiring talks from our researchers. Topics spanned neuromodulation (intended and unintended), spatial diversity and multiplexing in industrial Massive MIMO environments, magnetic shielding performance, and RF-EMF exposure assessment. Read more here. (March 2026)

Robin Wydaeghe won the third prize in the Sim4Life Student Competition 2025. Congratulations! Read more here. (Jan 2026)

On November 7th, imec-WAVES (Ghent University) organized a PhD Forum featuring four inspiring talks from our researchers, each presenting innovative work across wireless communication, sensing, and AI. Read more here. (Dec 2025)

Jeroen Van der Straeten et al. won best student poster award with his work titled: “A mmWave RF-EMF exposure sensor for 5G FR2: Concept and Design” 4th Annual Meeting of Bioelectromagnetics BioEM2025, Rennes, France, June 22-27 2025. (June 2025)

We are excited to announce the publication of a survey on Visible Light Sensing (VLS) by Morteza Alijani, Cedric De Cock, Wout Joseph, and David Plets in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (IF: 34.4). This paper provides an in-depth exploration of the evolution and potential of device-free VLS (DF-VLS) systems, focusing on their role in 6G networks and the Internet of Things (IoT). It examines key techniques, applications, and challenges, offering a roadmap for the future development of this transformative technology. Access the open-access paper here. (March 2025)

INVITATION: Shaping the AI revolution. Keynotes by Prof. Luc Martens (IMEC) and others. More details can be found here. (dec 2024)

Congratulations to Dr. Yuanbo Hou, supervised by Prof. Dick Botteldooren, for being awarded the “2023 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad” (A Category).

Thomas Tarnaud has obtained a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant from the European Research Council. With this grant he can develop his own research project an build his own research team. Congratulations!! Read more about his project URENIMOD. (Sept 2024)

Jorn Schampheleer won the Fingerprinting-Based Localisation Machine Learning Challenge at the COST INTERACT 5th Training School: AI/ML for 6G Communication Networks (and Beyond) held from July 1st to July 4th, 2024, at Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) in Castelldefels, Barcelona. (July 2024)

At the BioEM conference in Crete, Luc Martens ended his term as president.
Wout Joseph has been re-elected as board member of the BioEM society.
Congratulations to all! (June 2024)

Robin Wydaeghe et al. win second best scientific paper award in the Platform Competition (shared 2nd place) :“Accelerating mmWave exposure simulations and OUTREACH idea to Industry” 3th Annual Meeting of Bioelectromagnetics BioEM2024, Crete, Greece, June 16-21 2024.

FOLLOW US on LinkedIn

On Saturday December 10th 2022, professor Sarah Verhulst received the award "Laureate of the Academy" in the class Technical Sciences. This is one of the most prestigious awards of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. Young, promising researchers (up to 40 years old), whose main activity is situated in Flanders, are eligible for this. (Dec. 2022)

German Castellanos won the award for the best presentation of the day of the Annual Conference of Informatics, MUltimedia and Telecommunications Technologies, LACETEL, (ACIMUTT 2022) in CUBA with the presentation “60 GHZ NETWORK PLANNING FOR FIXED WIRELESS ACCESS.” (1-3 Nov 2022)

David Toribio won the award for interdisciplinary research at FEARS 2022 with his poster entitled “Radio-Frequency Absorption of a Western Honey Bee in the Near Field of Antennas”. (28 Oct 2022)

Tom Van de Steene won the IMEC 2022 Obstacle Challenge @ Imec Summer Festival 2022 in Leuven. Congratulations! (June 2022)

Robin Wydaeghe won the 2^nd place poster presentation award at the BioEM2022 conference in Nagoya, Japan. Congratulations! (June 2022)

Brecht De Beelde won the best student paper competition at URSI AT-AP RASC 2022. Congratulations! (June 2022)

Waves team building day in Bruges, April 2022.

Prof. Sarah Verhulst and her team receive European funding for innovative research that detects and treats hearing loss. Read more... (March 2022)

Chenglong Li is winner of two awards:
- Best paper award URSI Benelux Forum, 2^nd place, February 2022 C. Li, et al  “DUDAR: Device-Free Pedestrian Tracking Using Commodity Ultra-Wideband Radios”
- URSI Young Scientists Award based on his RFID research and the academic performance in radio science research field

Luc Martens is elected as president of the new Bioelectromagnetics society, Wout Joseph as board member (Feb 2022).

WAVES obtained 3 (!) EU projects in the Horizon-Health call Exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) and health: ETAIN, GOLIAT and SEAWAVE, Feb-2022.

• Sander Coene & Chenglong Li (imec-WAVES) were the (shared) winners of the UWB localisation competition at IPIN 2021, see also imec posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
• Cedric De Cock & David Plets (imec-WAVES) finished 2nd in the smartphone-based localisation competition at IPIN 2021.
• Sander Bastiaens et al. (imec-WAVES) were among the three nominees for the Best Paper Award at IPIN 2021 (out of 123 accepted papers). Read the work here!