Belgian professor heading Budapest’s top university

The President of the Republic’s resolution to appoint Bruno van Pottelsberghe as Rector was published in the Hungarian Official Gazette. The appointment of the Belgian university professor was supported by both the Senate of Corvinus University of Budapest and the Maecenas Universitatis Corvini Foundation, which maintains the university. In addition to acting as Rector, Van Pottelsberghe has been mandated to fulfil the responsibilities of President.

“Congratulations on the appointment of Mr van Pottelsberghe. I am looking forward with great anticipation to the new university cycle that we are starting with him. The results we have built so far with the model change provide a good basis for further improvements. Thanks to the incoming Rector’s impressive international professional experience and his clear leadership programme, Corvinus is now fully positioned to become a university of international repute, for which we will give all the support needed. I wish our new Rector every success in achieving this goal and working together” – said Zsolt Hernádi, President of the Board of Trustees of the Maecenas Universitatis Corvini Foundation on the resolution taken by the President of the Republic, uni-corvinus.hu wrote.

In recent years, Corvinus has tripled the number of Corvinus publications in the most prestigious scholarly journals, gained several prestigious international institutional accreditations, and expanded with a renewed programme offer and a modern campus in 2024 that meets all today’s needs. As a pioneer of model change, Corvinus is now on a stable, innovative and forward-looking path and has become a reference point for Hungarian higher education.

“I am honoured to start my work at one of the country’s leading higher education institutions, Corvinus University of Budapest. I will do everything in my power to continue along the road taken, and to contribute in every possible way to the further development and internationalisation of Corvinus. Working together with our lecturer-researcher colleagues, support staff members, students and partners, our goal is to make Corvinus one of the best and most attractive universities in Europe, with state-of-the-art training and research output.

It is important that we provide world-class programmes for the most talented young Hungarians at home, and that more and more international students choose Hungarian higher education. In the coming years, I intend to focus on three priority themes: changing to a new dimension in internationalisation and international visibility, further strengthening research excellence, promoting innovation in education, with a particular focus on sustainability and artificial intelligence” – said Bruno van Pottelsberghe on the occasion of his appointment.

Born in Belgium, Bruno van Pottelsberghe studied business economics, econometrics and international relations at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, obtaining his PhD in 1998, after visiting research positions in METI (Tokyo, 1995) and Columbia university (NYC, 1996). In his alma mater: From 2007-2011 and then from 2021 he acted as the Dean of the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, a faculty of ULB. From 2014 he has been the academic head of the Executive MBA programme and since 2004 he has served as advisor to the Rector and chairman of the ULB Valuation Committee.

 He is the initiator and co-founder of the international university network Quantitative Techniques for Economics and Management Network (QTEM), has performed numerous peer review visits for international accreditations, and has also gained non-academic experience at the OECD in Paris (1997-1999) and as Chief Economist of the European Patent Office (2005-2007). Bruno van Pottelsberghe’s main research fields are economics of innovation, patent systems, intellectual property rights, and technology transfer. He has an outstanding scientific record; he is the author or co-author of more than 60 scientific articles, as well as the author, co-author or co-editor of five books. He has considerable teaching experience in bachelor, master, Executive MBA and doctoral programmes.