Prof. Raoul Weiler, Belgium – Prof. Emeritus, Faculty of Bio-engineering Sciences Universiteit Leuven

A native of Belgium, with an academic background of Bio-Engineer in Chemistry from the University of Leuven (KUL), Belgium and a Doctor degree. He was post-doctoral Fellow in the USA at two universities, in North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in Washington DC at the Catholic University of America.

His industrial career started in a chemical multi-national in Germany in the Department of Applied Physics as a researcher and process engineer and ended, in Belgium, as ICT manager. Thereafter, he held teaching positions at different universities in Belgium, mainly at the University of Leuven (1997-2005), about the Socio-ethical Aspects of Technology, especially on the problem of sustainability, ethics and deontology for engineers. He is the author, of some forty scientific publications and patents, editor of six proceedings of symposia and conferences, among them the Proceedings of the World Conference on Filtration, 1986. He contributed as co-author and editor to twelve books, among them, Ethics of the Kyoto Protocol, 2005 and Proceedings of the joint World Conference of the Club of Rome and UNESCO, 2005.

He was president-elect of the Royal Society of Flemish Engineers (11,000 members), and founder-president of the EU-Chapter of the Club of Rome (CoR-EU) in Brussels and member of the Executive Committee of the Club of Rome International. He was Vice President of the European Academy for Sciences and Arts, Salzburg and co-founder of International Expert Group on Earth System Preservation (IESP), Munich. He participated at two UN World Summits: on Sustainable Development WSSD in Johannesburg, 2002, and on the Information Society WSIS in Geneva, 2003 and Tunis, 2005. In 2005 he participated at the World Social Forum WSF, Porto Alegre in Brazil and co-organized with UNESCO a World Conference on ICT for Capacity Building, in Paris. He was a member of the Wikimedia Advisory Board and participated at three Wikimania events, where he presented a project on the inclusion of objects of Ethnographic Museums in Wikicommons. Today he is member of the Comité de Pilotage, Division de l’éthique des sciences et des technologies, of UNESCO.