Bert Blocken

Prof. dr. ir. Bert Blocken (*1974, Hasselt, Belgium) holds a PhD in Civil Engineering / Building Physics (thesis focused on CFD & Building Aerodynamics) from KU Leuven in Belgium. He is Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering (Aerospace Engineering - Aerodynamics) at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, the United Kingdom, and part-time Full Professor of Civil Engineering (Building Physics) at KU Leuven in Belgium. His main areas of expertise are subsonic aerodynamics, CFD, wind tunnel testing, urban physics, city and building aerodynamics and sports aerodynamics. He has published 253 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. His h-index values are 80, 86, 101 on Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, respectively. He has graduated 34 PhD students. He developed the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in urban physics and sports aerodynamics, called "Sports & Building Aerodynamics" on the Coursera platform. According to the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking) & Elsevier, he was among the 150 most cited researchers world-wide both in the field of Civil Engineering and in the field of Energy Science & Engineering. He is listed as 2018-2024 Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) in the field of Engineering for production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science Core Collection, ranking him in about the top 0.1% researchers in his field according to Clarivate Analytics (https://hcr.clarivate.com/). He was listed as one of 15 engineers world-wide "who mattered in 2020" by Engineering.com (https://new.engineering.com/story/engineers-who-mattered-in-2020). His first paper on COVID-19, ventilation and fitness centers was ranked by Altmetric in the top 0.003% of tracked articles (www.altmetric.com/top100/2020/). He is a Guest Lecturer at the Kyiv Aviation Institute in Ukraine, lecturing subsonic wind tunnel testing & CFD. He regularly acts as a Guest Lecturer at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics and for the Certificate in Advanced Studies (CAS) in Cycling Coaching by the University of Lausanne and the International Cycling Union (UCI). He is Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Building & Environment and Associate Editor of the journal Sports Engineering. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Wind Engineering & Industrial Aerodynamics, Building Simulation and the journal Advances in Wind Engineering.