Speakers
Meet the voices shaping Learning Bytes Festival 2026.
Independent contributor
Stijn holds a PhD in Instructional Psychology and Pedagogy from KU Leuven. He has designed and managed learning systems at Mastercard, at NATO as head of the Learning Technologies Section, and today at ESHRE, where he oversees education, certification and accreditation for reproductive healthcare specialists across Europe.
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CEO TEO Training
Bien Vanderstappen is CEO & co-owner of TEO.training, where she works on closing the technical skills gap through hands-on training, and is a regular keynote voice on the future of tech talent.
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Creative Strategist WikomIQ BV
Niko Verhaegen is an XR & AI innovation lead specialising in the future of workforce learning. For more than 25 years he has helped organisations transform the way people learn, and at imec he leads XR programmes that turn technical training into data-driven competency development.
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Senior Researcher — imec IPI Lab
Brian G. Booth is a senior researcher in the imec image processing and interpretation lab at Ghent University. A Marie Curie fellow, his research focuses on industrial computer vision and the challenges of taking vision technology from the lab into real working environments.
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Head of Portfolio, Product Division at Learnlight
Irina Cavescu is a learning and product strategist focused on what makes us human at work. As Head of Portfolio at Learnlight, she leads global portfolio strategy across interpersonal, intercultural and language skills, helping organisations build the capabilities people need to perform and collaborate in an increasingly complex world of work.
Professor and senior researcher at imec & UGent
Klaas Bombeke works at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and engineering at the imec-mict-UGent research group, and co-founded the spin-off Spatial Dynamics, which builds VR-based assessments for the workforce of tomorrow.
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Postdoctoral semantic web researcher at imec & UGent
Ben De Meester researches semantic and technical interoperability at IDLab, Ghent University & imec. As one of the leads behind RML.io and FnO, he builds the methods that let organisations exchange data securely and at scale.
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EU Projects & Customer Success Manager at Athumi
Brecht Wyns has worked in data governance since 2012 and joined Inrupt to work with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on personal data vaults. At Athumi he enables trusted, consent-based data exchange between citizens, organisations and governments.
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Research and valorization manager at imec & KU Leuven
Frederik Cornillie (PhD, KU Leuven) is research and valorization manager at Itec, a research group of KU Leuven and imec. He initiated Learning Bytes Festival in 2022 and has been the driving force behind its scientific programme ever since.
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Legal & Policy Advisor at Federgon
Maurits Vanackere is Co-Director Flanders and Legal & Policy Advisor at Federgon, the Belgian federation of HR service providers. He specialises in labour market policy, employment regulation and lifelong learning.
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Operations Training & Project Manager at imec
Griet Holsbeek holds a PhD in Biology and manages the FAB Training Center at imec, where she builds scalable learning approaches — including XR-based training — that keep pace with rapid technological and operational change.
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CEO of UQ Learn and Zaia
Thierry Lescrauwaet is CEO of UQ Learn and Zaia, a Board Member of Federgon and member of the advisory board for the EU Digital Skills and Jobs ecosystem. He believes the future of work is a team sport, and should be inclusive by design.
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Research manager at HIVA, KU Leuven
Mikkel Barslund is research manager at HIVA, the research institute for work and society at KU Leuven, where his work covers labour markets, skills and the economics of ageing workforces.
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Station Chief at Edtech Station
Thomas Van Cauwenberghe is Station Chief of Edtech Station and an opinion leader in educational technology. Under his leadership the network has grown to over 350 active companies, bringing businesses, researchers, schools and L&D teams together.
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