Koen van Balen

Koenraad Van Balen graduated as Engineer-Architect at the KU Leuven (Belgium) in 1979; post-graduate degree in architectural conservation in 1984 and a Ph.D in Engineering in 1991 at the KU Leuven.
Since October 2022 he is an emeritus professor at the KU Leuven, the Civil Engineering department and he is the former acting director of the Raymond Lemaire International Center for Conservation (RLICC) at the University of Leuven, holder of the PRECOM3OS UNESCO chair since 2008-2024. He was member of the research Council of KU Leuven from 2016-2020. He is one of the initiators of HERKUL: the KU Leuven Institute for Cultural heritage.
Through HERKUL and the collaboration within the Una Europa alliance – of which KU Leuven is part – he is strongly involved in the activities of the European Institute of Technology (EIT) Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) Culture and Creativity and in the European Heritage Hub.
Koen Van Balen was recently be appointed as member of the panel for the European Heritage Label by the European Commission. He is also a member of the Council of Europa Nostra.
He has many publications and managed different research projects dealing with heritage preservation, ancient and new sustainable construction materials. He was member of the Scientific Committee of the European-wide research coordination initiative “Joint Program Initiative: Cultural Heritage (JPI-CH)”. Relevant projects and publications are
• the ILUCIDARE project dealing with Cultural Heritage Led innovation and international relations (2018-2022) providing a wealth of educational material on Cultural Heritage led innovation and cultural heritage led international relations: https://ilucidare.eu/resources/database/ilucidare-inspiration-kit;
• Cultural Heritage Counts for Europe project and report (2015) introducing the “upstream approach”.