Stefaan Vaes

Stefaan Vaes (born February 29, 1976, in Herentals, Belgium) is a Belgian mathematician. Vaes studied mathematics at KU Leuven with a diploma in 1998 and a PhD in 2001 with thesis advisor Alfons Van Daele and thesis Locally Compact Quantum Groups. As a postdoc, he worked from 1998 to 2002 at KU Leuven and from 1998 to 2002 in Paris, where he did research for CNRS. In 2002, he began part-time teaching at KU Leuven, where he became an associate professor in 2006 and a full professor in 2009.

He was a visiting professor in 2009 at Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI) and in 2011 at Paris Diderot University (Paris VII) (where he habilitated in 2004). In 2005, he held the Peccot Chair at the Collège de France.

His research deals with Von Neumann algebras and quantum groups.

In 2010, Vaes was an invited speaker with a talk on Rigidity for von Neumann algebras and their invariants at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2015, he received the Francqui Prize.

His doctoral students include Cyril Houdayer.